Story & Photos
By Michael Kinney
Bryane Broadie thought it was a scam. In fact, when he saw the email back in 2022, he didn’t even open it.
As an IT specialist, Broadie had seen his share of online scams that had flowed to his email account. But something told him to go back and open the email and just make sure it wasn’t anything important.
That simple decision ended up changing the direction of Broadie’s life. The email was from the producers of the TV series “The Chi.” They wanted Broadie to create the cover art for season five.
That opportunity ended up spurring Broadie to quit his IT job and become a full-time artist. It helped give him the confidence to take his art to the masses and bet on himself.
That was three years ago. Since then, Prince George County (Md.) native has been living the up-and-coming artist life. He finds himself on the road showcasing his talents in different cities and regions. That includes the Festival of Arts (April 24-27) at Bicentennial Park in Oklahoma City.
Despite it being the first time for Broadie to step foot in Oklahoma, much less at the festival, his digital media took home the festival’s Best in Show, which “recognizes extraordinary craftsmanship, creativity, and overall artistic impact, inspiring human connection. Oklahoma City proudly supports the leaders of our community and the arts.”
Broadie’s pieces focus on the struggles and triumphs in the black community using digital art and mixed media.
“In a way, you can kind of say it’s like black futurism,” said Broadie. “I struggled with reading when I was younger. I’ve always been like a visual learner. And now I tend to put all the things that I read into my artwork because I know that it’s a lot of other black children now who are probably visual learners like me. But I will describe my art as bringing beauty to an ugly past, because I put a lot of black history in it, and I like telling the stories that some people in our community might not know, but the rest of the world doesn’t know.”
Broadie didn’t get involved with digital art until he was attending Bowie State University in 2005. At the time, he was still lost as far as knowing what he wanted to do in life.
“I kind of grew up in a household that didn’t really pay attention to anything that dealt with art education or anything, so I struggled in it a lot,” Broadie said. “But when I got to Bowie State University, I was walking across campus and one of my homeboys was walking across the yard with this piece of artwork he had just created. Everything from my childhood, when I was drawing and sketching, just popped into my head.”
Even though he took classes in photography, sculpture, and drawing, it was digital art that felt natural to Broadie.
Despite that, when he graduated from college in 2008 at the height of the Great Recession, he couldn’t find a job for three and a half years, he lost his apartment, he lost his car and his credit score was 300.
“I was living the starving artist life,” Broadie said. “I kind of gave up on art.”
Broadie went back and got his Master’s Degree in cybersecurity and worked a corporate IT job in D.C for the next 12 years until he decided it was time to take the path he meant to be on.
But first, he had to tell his family.
“My father said I was crazy when I quit my job,” Broadie said. “He said, “You’re giving up your good, good, government job? I feel like with his generation, when a black person or any person says they’re going to pursue art, it’s like all they think of as starving artists, because they don’t know anybody personally that has been able to be successful.”
It wasn’t until Broadie’s father watched him sell a painting for $1,400 that he began to come around on the artists’ life.
Broadie’s artwork (WWW.BBroadie.com) often depicts men and women in varying degrees of activities. From the “Reader King”, which shows an adolescent leaning on a stack of books written by famous black authors (The Reader King) to “She Flies”, which features a young lady dancing with gold chains on her ankles.
That includes his favorite piece, “Mind Growth,” which shows a young man positioned in front of a blue background and the sun behind his head. Flowers are growing from the top of his skull and down his face as he stares straight ahead.
At the Festival of Arts, Broadie had sold a limited-edition print of “Mind Growth” on his first day. Later on, as he explained the origin behind the painting and the trauma associated with it, a patron started to cry before purchasing a print as well.
Broadie says being a black, gay, male artist, he hopes to inspire future generations of creators by encouraging them to believe in themselves.
“I just love it when somebody wants to hang something of mine in their home,” Broadie said. “But I don’t have a dream of being in the biggest gallery or the biggest museum. If it happens, it happens. But for me, it’s using art as a tool to heal, especially coming from our community and seeing so many young men and young women who are struggling and can’t find a form of expression or don’t know what to do with all that energy.”
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