Large Art Dreaming (Sept 2021- Nov 2021)

About Broderick Flanigan

Broderick Flanigan’s Website | Instagram

For artists of a certain tradition, art-making is intrinsically tied up with community-building. Athens, GA, painter and muralist Broderick Flanigan is one of those artists. Flanigan’s processes are rooted in community uplift and love, elements he brings to his works in a variety of ways. When he is commissioned to make a mural in a new city, Flanigan invites citizens to tell him about the local people and the place he is in, drawing on that dialogue as he designs his piece, and incorporating local figures and visual elements that are suggested to him by the community. The community is also integral to the making of these works — Flanigan writes his budgets to incorporate stipends to pay local student artists to help complete his murals, and when being interviewed by local press, he asks that reporters talk not only to him, but also to his young assistants.

For Flanigan, passing the mic to give others a chance to use their voices is an integral part of the practice. Flanigan’s studio practice, though more solitary, is no less rooted in community. On canvas, he uses his brightly colored style and a variety of mixed-media elements to make portraits of members of the community around his art studio, which is located near a public housing hub in a majority-Black neighborhood, with the kind of dignity and recognition that those from outside the community often fail to bring. And the art he makes about the people around him comes from a place of deep thoughtfulness about their lives and the factors that affect them.

A recent series of paintings featuring hundreds of discarded bottle caps Flanigan collected exemplifies the many ways community is expressed in his studio practice. Exploring the question of what having all these bottle caps around means for a community, and drawing on a childhood game in which he and a friend would collect bottle caps and try to find the rarest one, the series incorporates these bottle caps to depict a 16th century-style halo, the bars of a cell and a throne, while exploring themes of economic stratification, feelings of being trapped and elevating troubled neighbors with love. This, ultimately, is the thrust of Flanigan’s practice, from the privacy of his studio to the walls of far-flung cities, as well as in his work as an organizer in his day job — a place where people can be recognized and allowed to participate as their full selves. “I’m not speaking in terms of assimilation,” he says. “What can we create where people are from so that they can show up and participate as their full selves?”