Bay Area native Adrian L. Burrell's rising artistic star reveals a love for storytelling through various media.
There are times when Adrian L. Burrell (@adrianlburrell) says he feels like an artistic Forrest Gump. He has been everywhere and experienced so much in a short time. The multimedia artist, born and raised in Oakland, is having more than a moment.
Call it many moments. At 17, Burrell enlisted in the Marine Corps, and while on active duty, he produced a feature film screened at SXSW. After leaving the Marines, his brother was murdered in Oakland in 2015. Burrell continued to create and attended the San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford. The artist traveled across four continents, volunteering with nonprofits—all while making art and learning from theorists like Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers and Bedour Alagraa, a professor of Black political and social theory.
Adrian L. Burrell, “Antonia” (2023) is part of SF’s Minnesota Street Project’s Venus Blues through Dec. 3.
“My work endeavors to trouble fixed notions of archives that seem to overdetermine the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from,” says Burrell. “As a storyteller, I use whatever medium the story demands—photography, sculpture, film, installation or performance. I put everything into it, and I think people can feel that when they sit with the work.”
Viewing Burrell’s many canvasses means checking in with the artist’s past, populated by 22 aunts, uncles and a host of cousins. “I loved sitting with my grandparents and listening to their migration stories,” he says. “Much of my creativity and the texture of who I am now— and what I make—comes from that experience.”
Adrian L. Burrell, “God Don’t Like Ugly” (2020)
His journey, familial and intellectual, produced work shown at SFMOMA (the museum acquired his photo series, It*’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?),* the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia (winner of best documentary short for 2022), ICA San Jose, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, MOAD in SF and even on the pages of the New Yorker. His show, Venus Blues, runs at San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project (minnesotastreetproject.com) through Dec. 3, and Art Basel Miami attendees will also see his pieces this month.
Burrell is developing his first feature film, Cousins, which won the 2022 SFFILM Rainin Grant. Fans can preorder his first book, Sugarcane and Lightning, a mix-tape of Black life and American history from his familial perspective, via Minor Matters Books (minormattersbooks.com); the delivery date is early in 2024.
Adrian L. Burrell, “Cyclical Symphony” (2020)
“I’m also excited about returning to Dakar, Senegal, to show work in the 2024 Dakar Biennial,” says Burrell. “In 2022, I was in Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock residency and was invited back to show work for 2024.”
How does the artist— who has witnessed so much—continue to evolve? “I think about the next phase in my evolution as one where I find and create more opportunities to work in the narrative format. I have screenplays I’m working on, and one of my dreams is to bring them to life.”
Adrian L. Burrell, “Can to Cant” (2022)
Burrell says he will continue questioning what calm resembles while living among “the repetitions of catastrophe.” So, he dreams of developing a 10-acre parcel in the Bay Area that supports rest for artists and survivors of state and communal violence. “I’m sure the next evolution of me as an artist will live somewhere within these intersections.”
The art world—and anyone seeking beautiful expressions of the truth— can hardly wait to see how the story plays out.
Photography by: PORTRAIT BY TRACY EASTON; ARTWORKS BY ADRIAN L. BURRELL
