Queen Brooks

In 2020, the Southern Ohio Museum featured the work of Queen Brooks in an exhibit.

In 2012, the organization known as The HistoryMakers conducted an oral interview with Queen Brooks for its African-American video oral history collection, which aims to cultivate "a more inclusive record of American history."

Brooks was nurtured as an artist by a tight-knit group of influential black Columbus-area artists, which included Bill Agnew, nationally famed woodcarver Elijah Pierce, outsider artist "Grandpa Smoky" Brown, MacArthur Fellow Aminah Robinson, and Brooks' own personal mentors, photographer Kojo Kamau, and mixed-media artist Barbara Chavous. She began her arts career teaching arts and crafts at the J. Ashburn Jr. Youth Center in 1980, which is where she first encountered pyrography (wood-burning). After receiving her MFA at Ohio State University, she completed a residency in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, West Africa as the recipient of the 1993 Lila Wallace, Reader’s Digest International Artist Award.

Queen Brooks (born 1943) is an artist from Columbus, Ohio, best known for her distinctive, brightly painted, wood-burned pieces. Brooks has been described by The Columbus Dispatch as "one of Ohio’s best-known African-American artists," and by Columbus Museum of Art director Nannette Maciejunes as "a leading arts elder in our community." Brooks is an influential mentor of many younger artists, including psycheñwelic painter April Sunami. She is a past winner of the Lila Wallace, Reader's Digest International Artist Award, which gave her a fellowship in Abidjan, the capital of the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire.