Brooke Toczylowski

Brooke Toczylowski (b. 1981, Pittsfield, Massachusetts), grew up in New England and as an adult has lived in Venezuela, Guatemala, New York City, and Oakland, California. She is an interdisciplinary, research-based artist who combines studio and social practice and works in drawing, painting, printmaking, performance, and installation. Brooke has been awarded two Artist Respond grants from the Connecticut Office the Arts and recently presented her MFA thesis exhibition at MASS MoCA. She has participated in artist residencies at Walkaway House, Millay Arts, In Cahoots, the Kala Art Institute, and more. Her work has also been shown at Installation Space, Five Points Arts Center, The Kent Art Association, Gallery RAG, the Cambridge Art Association, Anonymous Society Gallery, and the Kala Art Institute. Brooke has more than 20 years in public education and is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of Agency by Design Oakland, in Oakland, CA, which grew out of collaborative research with Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Toczylowski earned her BA in Studio Art and American Studies from Williams College and recently completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Clark University. She currently resides on Sicaog and Wangunk land in central Connecticut. 

Ghost-printed plants and netting, botanical inks—alive—shifting over time, wet-on-wet paintings dissolving edges, sewing as repair and rupture. Through materiality and mark making, my layered work asks the viewer to immerse themselves in difficult questions about our historical, social, and ecological relationship to land. My interdisciplinary fieldwork, research, and material explorations make visible, and deconstruct, the lineage of colonial thinking that positions us as “owners” of the land. By engaging the senses and inviting in more-than-human collaborators, I explore the space between borders and belonging. 

In my public practice, I gather people in my community garden plot to collectively learn from each other and our environs. Engaging fences and gardens, tools at the heart of land dispossession in New England, I explore the possibility of shifting ideology. 

In the studio, my current body of work invites the resilient red amaranth plant, a garden volunteer, to make sense of the time we live in. Painting with fugitive ink and sacrificing the plants to the etching press, I aim to dismantle a myth of human mastery. The paintings are combined with monoprints of garden fencing and stitched into full-body offerings, shrouds for the deceased. My practice holds the grief and complicity of watching violent tragedies from afar, while also considering the possibility of regeneration and renewal.