Art aficionados in Dallas and beyond might already know Bria Gladney.
The Plano native went viral a few years ago after rapper Gucci Mane shared her artwork. At the time, Gladney was the go-to artist for graduation cap designs. They featured uplifting quotes and images to match, like Jhené Aiko’s “Trip” album-inspired cap or portraits with Bible verses. Gladney has since made a name for herself on social media by combining comedy and visual art.
Between Instagram and Twitter, the 27-year-old has over 36,000 followers. She’s known for portraits, pop art and popping off, mostly about her unapologetic love for Black people.
Gladney thought she knew herself too. At the beginning of 2020, she took her niche to the next level. She bought a green screen and a wig, planning to be an artist and comedic personality.
“I wanted to be a Dave Chapelle that could paint,” said Gladney, who lives in Irving. “But the pandemic happened.”
At the start of the global crisis, content creators along with millions of others joined TikTok, spending the early days of lockdowns posting skits and other engaging videos. Suddenly, everyone could do green screens and other special effects offered by the app.
Gladney had to make herself stand out. She just didn’t know how.
That’s when the artist of five years realized that she hadn’t found her voice yet.
From cartoons to commissions
As a senior at the University of North Texas, Gladney volunteered to illustrate a cartoon for one of her friends. Her sketches that started out as a joke turned out to be surprisingly advanced.
“I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute,’” Gladney said. “‘I was just playing, but I guess I’m kind of good at this.’”
Although Gladney took art in grade school, she said she never practiced outside of class. In fact, when she started drawing in college, her family didn’t believe the creations were hers. In middle school, Gladney took credit for her younger sister’s drawings because her sister was too shy to claim them as her own.
The history and communications major kept drawing, pulling inspiration from the Disney Channel show The Proud Family. Then she practiced digital sketches on her iPad. Her first painting, a portrait of fashion model Iman in an 8-by-10-inch sketchbook, gained so much attention that people commissioned her for their graduation caps. She started out at $75 per hat until she had so many orders that she doubled her price to $150.
Gladney wanted to teach history at inner-city schools, but when commissions took off, she focused on art, realizing that she could be an entrepreneur.
It didn’t take long for graduation caps to turn into portrait requests. Gladney painted people’s family members, significant others and favorite celebrities.
Gladney’s first attempt at animation drew over a million views on Twitter, and she gained even more followers and clout with the character she calls “Lil Bria.”
She went viral again in 2019 after she tweeted a video promoting a self-portrait that took over 40 hours to paint. The tweet reached almost 700 replies, and 300 new inquiries filled Gladney’s email inbox.
“I said I would charge $500, which is not even minimum wage,” Gladney said.
“Nobody could buy it. So it’s like, you’re back to the drawing board.”
Gladney kept doing smaller commissions and Lil Bria videos while working up to her brand shift last year. The pandemic not only upended her Chapelle idea, it stagnated almost all of her incoming requests.
People weren’t buying art because they were financially strained, which led to Gladney being cash-strapped too.
The artist found herself losing motivation until George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer last May.
Gladney started a daily pop art series inspired by trending works on Pinterest. Most of the drawings — reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s pieces from the 1960s — were almost exact replicas, with the exception of the people being Black and the text changing.
A few people accused her of stealing other artists’ work.
“I was trying to make a political statement,” Gladney said.
“I wanted to reverse culture appropriate so that [white people] could feel how mad I felt before and still make money off of it.”
Gladney sold prints of the pieces and also put the designs on phone cases, pillows, shirts and other apparel.
But when the buzz died down, she found herself in the same place she was at the beginning of the pandemic.
The pop art series ended, and commissions were few and far between. Many of her friends were doing well because of the surge of people wanting to support Black businesses, but Gladney felt like she didn’t have anything to offer.
“Everything that I was giving them was self-centered,” Gladney said. “Like what joke can make y’all laugh? Or who can I upset so people can retweet?
“It brought me back to, ‘OK, what do you really care about?’”
Finding purpose
In December, Gladney stopped accepting commissions to reflect on her artistic purpose.
For the past two months, she’s been working on illustrating a rendition of Goldilocks where the main character is a little Black girl with golden dreadlocks. The book will be the first in a series of children’s books Gladney is planning to self-publish on Amazon.
“A lot of the reason I am the way I am today and why I feel so confident and fearless in saying things is because of things I saw in children’s books,” Gladney said. “I want to give children that same level of confidence.”
Brown Like Me, a book from the ‘90s, follows Noelle, a 5-year-old Black girl adopted into a white family. Throughout the story, she identifies things that are brown like her skin.
“That was the first children’s book that I remember that made me feel like something,” Gladney said.
The artist said she wants her stories to emulate The Proud Family, and even today, she’s inspired by the main character, Penny Proud, a Black middle-schooler who is unwavering in her beliefs.
For now, she’ll also produce more content for “Lil Bria,” an adult animation in which “I can be my political, powerful self.” Her ultimate goal is to be “the Black Disney” and create all forms of kids’ entertainment.
In addition to children’s books, she wants to make animated series and movies.
Gladney knew closing commissions to focus on her new path was a gamble, but she said creating for children has been fulfilling.
“I feel confident about doing something that’s bigger than me. Hopefully the world follows,” she said.
