Biography

Joan Brown’s eclectic paintings and sculptures tell the story of an independent woman who fearlessly experimented with a range of styles, techniques, and subjects throughout her artistic career. A student of Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, and a second-generation Bay Area Figurative artist, Brown achieved an extraordinary fusion of abstract expressionism and figuration while working in a deeply autobiographical mode.

Brown began her studies in 1955 at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where she was at once entranced by the “intoxicating atmosphere … the smell of oil paint in the air and the sound of bongo drums drifting through the halls as students made music around the courtyard pool.”1 But while she enjoyed the sun-filled Mediterranean-style campus, Brown struggled to complete her first year of required coursework. Enrolling in her first class with Elmer Bischoff in 1956, she encountered “the first serious, committed person she had ever met in her life.”2 Along with her other instructors, most notably Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell, Brown was counseled to experiment and to relish the freedom of the creative process—regardless of the criticism she might endure or the lack of financial compensation she received.

During the 1950s, Brown exhibited in various underground San Francisco venues, including the 6, the Spatsa, and the Batman Gallery. She received her first major exposure, however, when New York gallery owner George Staempfli visited her San Francisco studio in 1959—the same year she painted Swimming Party and Bicycle Ride. Within a few months, he purchased a handful of paintings and invited the 21-year-old to mount a solo exhibition at his Manhattan gallery.

Like many of her paintings from this time, Swimming Party and Bicycle Ride suggests a blend of abstract expressionism and representational imagery. “Often during Brown’s painting process a work might evolve from a landscape to an abstraction and then to an interior scene,” according to art historian Karen Tsujimoto, “thus revealing the intuitive and spontaneous way that Brown preferred to work.”3 While the title calls to mind one of Brown’s favorite adolescent activities—swimming in San Francisco Bay near Aquatic Park—the abstract color masses and mysteriously wrapped forms can also be linked to her fascination with “Mexican mummies, men with turbans, and Goya’s squat sculptured forms.”4 Confident with her own stylistic experimentation, she proclaimed that she “didn’t give a damn about the objects as being objects for themselves anymore and they started evolving into these shapes.”5 The emergence of these abstract forms has been credited to her influential instructor Frank Lobdell, who also painted mysterious unnamable forms.

The large scale of Brown’s canvases from this time allowed her to immerse herself in the painting process—her tendency to cover herself with paint from head to toe is legendary. In a 1960 issue of ARTnews, Vivien Raynor wrote, “Brown appears to throw herself into the act of painting as if it were swimming, sunbaking, or any other physical pleasure. She wallows in all the colors, and it is easy for the spectator to become infected with her ebullience.”6 In the 1970s, almost ten years after completing Swimming Party and Bicycle Ride, Brown began a series of paintings and assemblages devoted to her increasingly favorite pastime of swimming—a sport that serves as a powerful metaphor for her lifelong art-making pursuits. The meditative ritual of swimming, according to Brown, permitted her to escape her daily routine and encouraged “the freedom of having no limits.”7

Brown learned to relish such freedoms and would continue to do so after she and her husband Gordon Cook divorced in 1975. That same year Brown embarked on a series of international travels, which, like swimming, allowed her to escape her daily routine and to immerse herself in the cultures of the world. Her visits to Europe, South America, China, Egypt, and India inspired her studies of ancient belief systems and comparative religions. “I am fascinated by the similar threads that run through the ancient cultures,” she explained. “Images, ideas, and impressions that are particularly meaningful to me appear in my work after my journeys.”8 During the summer of 1976, Brown traveled to Europe with funds from a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a stipend from the University of California, Berkeley. The Journey #1 is the first painting from a series of works inspired by her whirlwind European adventure, where she spent extended time with her son Noel as well as with Modesto Lanzone, a close friend she knew from San Francisco in the 1950s. The flattened, quickly sketched cartoonlike imagery of this painting depicts the artist leading a companion by the hand. Other paintings in the series depict romantic nightclub scenes or lovers shown in intimate embrace. Her work from the Journey series serves as more than just a simple diary of her European adventures. When viewed in totality, it suggests that Brown’s journey was a time of deep personal reflection, which, according to curator Karen Kienzle, allowed her to explore “the physical passage of travel as a metaphor for a more internal journey—that of an intimate relationship.”9

In the 1980s, Brown’s search for spiritual peace led her to seek commissions for numerous public sculptures that she erected around the world. Tragically, Brown’s life was cut short in a fatal accident during the 1990 installation of an obelisk for Sathya Sai Baba’s Museum in Puttaparthi, India. —A.W.

1. Karen Tsujimoto, “Painting as a Visual Diary: The Art of Joan Brown,” in Tsujimoto and Jacquelynn Bass, The Art of Joan Brown (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Oakland Museum of California, 1998), 4.
2. Joan Brown, quoted in Tsujimoto, 11.
3. Tsujimoto, 13.
4. Brown, quoted in Charlotte Willard, “Women of American Art,” Look, 27 September 1960, 75.
5. Brown, quoted in Mary Fuller McChesney, A Period of Exploration: San Francisco, 1945–50 (Oakland, Calif.: The Oakland Museum, 1973), 85–86.
6. Vivien Raynor, “Joan Brown,” ARTnews, April 1960, 48.
7. Tsujimoto, 115.
8. Brown, quoted in Henry Hopkins, 50 West Coast Artists (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991), 34.
9. Karen Kienzle, “Joan Brown,” Into the 21st Century, exh. cat. (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 1999), 19.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco and studied at the California School of Fine Arts in the mid 1950s. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute; the University of Victoria, British Columbia; California State University, Sacramento; the Academy of Art College, San Francisco; and the University of California, Berkeley.  Brown died tragically while installing a public sculpture in India in 1990. A retrospective exhibition of her work was jointly organized by the Oakland Museum of California and the Berkeley Art Museum in 1996 and her work is owned by many major museums. SJMA currently owns one later figurative painting by Brown. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)


Born in San Francisco, CA; died in Proddatur, India

Born in 1938 in San Francisco, Brown was a voracious reader as a child, with an interest in diverse cultures and ancient civilizations. A second-generation Bay Area Figurative artist, she began her studies in 1955 at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where her instructors included Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell.  After earning her BA and MA, Brown taught at CSFA before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1950s, Brown exhibited in various underground San Francisco venues, including the 6, the Spatsa, and the Batman Gallery. She received her first major exposure, however, when New York gallery owner George Staempfli visited her San Francisco studio in 1959. Within a few months, he purchased a handful of paintings and invited Brown to mount a solo exhibition at his Manhattan gallery. Brown achieved an extraordinary fusion of abstract expressionism and figuration while working in a deeply autobiographical mode, especially after the birth of her son, Noah, with her husband Manuel Neri. Brown died in 1990 in India; she was installing an obelisk at an ashram when a turret that was under construction fell and killed her and her two assistants. [Bio from Juicy Paint Exhibition, input by R. Faust, 8/1//2010]

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