Before the pandemic, Brooke Chaney was teaching art at Uplift Infinity Preparatory school in Irving. But when the students left for spring break in March 2020, they never came back to class — and neither did she.
“It gave me time and gave me space,” Chaney said. “I was finally able to apply the things that I was teaching to the kids, to my own art practice.”
There was a lot to process at the time. The pandemic’s seemingly never-ending costs, and the growing support across the country for the Black Lives Matter movement. That inspired Chaney’s first official body of work: a series of conceptual sculptures.
“There was a little bit of hopefulness and, you know, dread,” Chaney said. “But hearing how moved people were by the work was really motivating. Using the energy that I had in my own work, I had never really felt confident enough to do that before.”
Chaney has been…
