An abstract artist, he used vivid colors, lines, stripes, squares and circles to infuse a feeling of improvisational jazz in his works.
[1][2] Brooker grew up in South Philadelphia and stuttered as a child (an impediment he overcame when he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).
They advised him and the new Black students on ways to survive: work hard and don't mess around, win the school's traveling scholarships and make their place in the art world.
[6][7] Brooker was also influenced by Morris Blackburn, who had attended the academy in the 1920s, who introduced him to the works of Dox Thrash and artist Charles Pridgen.
Pridgen used Cubism in his works, which is exemplified in his 1950 painting “The Blues,” in the collection of the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
While at PAFA, Brooker often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art where he encountered Julius Bloch’s “Stevedore.” It was the first positive depiction of a Black man he had ever seen.
As a graduate student, he taught silkscreen printing at the Brandywine Workshop, a stint that improved his skills as a printmaker and teacher.
As a child, he used chalk to draw Batman, Captain Marvel and Green Hornet figures on the pavement streets.
[11][18] Brooker's earliest works were figurative, and his subjects were taken from the church: parishioners in the pews, men nodding off to sleep, young couples and grandmothers, a woman shouting in the back, the women's hats.
[5] Driving through the city, he saw graffiti on the buildings – abstract drawings of shapes, colors, letters that seemed to pulsate with energy.
[5] The Black-owned Malcolm Brown Gallery in that city often exhibited and sold works by African American artists.
[20][11][22][23] The award was the impetus for a show at the Robert L. Kidd Associates, Inc. Galleries in Birmingham, MI, where all of his works sold out and his prices increased.
[6] “If jazz could be expressed in purely visual terms, it might look like Brooker’s works – a series of improvisations laid over a recognizable structure,” wrote one reviewer.
[24] Another noted that his titles were laced with folk wisdom: “Slow Motion Monday,” “What goes round comes round,” “There’s nothing to do but Today, “I can’t dance and it’s too wet, I can’t plow.“[25] Brooker created mixed-media works on canvas and paper using acrylics, base coat, oils, oil sticks and encaustic, an Egyptian medium that combined hot wax with color.
[26] As a printmaker, he participated in a yearlong project at the Maryland institute College of Art in 1987 to produce silkscreen prints.
D. G.” It is a Latin term for Soli Deo Gloria or “to the Glory of God alone.” [28][1] Brooker was a nationally and internationally recognized teacher.
[16] Again, he exhibited in faculty shows and museums, and was commissioned to create artwork for the newly built Hough Branch Library in Cleveland.
There had been a lengthy fight in the courts over transferring the collection from Merion, PA, in the suburbs of Philadelphia to Benjamin Franklin Parkway among other major city museums.
The founders were Syd Carpenter, James Dupree, Carolyn Hayward-Jackson, Richard Jordan, Charles Searles, Hubert C. Taylor and Andrew Turner.
Recherche was also formed because Black artists were largely left out of most exhibitions at museums, galleries and alternative spaces.
[56][57][54][58][59] Brooker received a major commission in 2014 to create windows for an elevator tower at the Long Island Railroad building in Wyandanch, NY.
He participated in a project to bring art to the people by producing posters that were erected at city bus-stop shelters.
[15] In 1971, he was in an exhibit at the Philadelphia Recreation Department's Lee Cultural Center titled “Young, Gifted and Black.” One of his abstracts won first prize.
The show was produced with the Urban Outreach Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with an aim of highlighting the talents of young Black artists in the Delaware Valley who faced difficulty getting their works before the public.