If Freedom was a house, what would the house be like?
Freedom House: An Exhibition is a multimedia installation equipped with poems, film, furniture, and collages that simulate what freedom — embodied in everyone’s most delicate and personal place — looks, feels, and sounds like. The poems in this exhibit are from KB Brookins’ book of the same name (Freedom House - available for purchase at Prizer), and KB aims to make them more than what can exist on a page. What happens when we live what we language, when we speak of “art” as a verb? When a home displays everything we’ve been through, and everything we stretch for when we say buzzwords like “liberation”, “free _____”, “defund the police”, and the like? A home is a mind well-lived in. Art is one of the many tools we need in order to create a truly free world. So take a walk through KB’s Freedom House. It’s meant to be lived and loved in by you.
About the artist: KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and installation artist from Texas. Their writing is featured in Poets.org, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Poetry Society of America, Oxford American, and elsewhere. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and an ALA Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut full-length poetry collection Freedom House was called “urgent and timely” by Vogue; named a Best Book of 2023 by Autostraddle, Texas Observer, Chicago Review of Books, and The Poetry Question; and won the ALA Barbara Gittings Literature Award for Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf) releases on May 28, 2024.
Their previous art installations include Y(our) Town and American History Vol. II. Y(our) Town is a piece KB created that incorporates the circle — as a symbol of repetition, perfection, and faces — as well as literal symbols to make maps of three cities: Fort Worth, TX, Austin, TX, and Provincetown, MA. It debuted as part of a group exhibition with the Fine Arts Work Center in August 2023. American History Vol. II was a group exhibition presented at RichesArt Gallery that KB participated in as a poet in February 2023. Freedom House: An Exhibition is KB’s first solo installation. Follow KB online at @earthtokb.