September 1998
Transformation: The Art of Joan Brown
Presented by the Art Department

One of California's pre-eminent figurative artists, Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco and died in October 1990, at the age of 52, in India. Long recognized as one of the important artists who emerged from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s, she has yet to receive her due as a nationally significant figure based on her entire oeuvre. She created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision, even though her creative output was cut short by her premature death.

The public will have a chance to see her full range in Transformation: The Art of Joan Brown, an exhibition co-organized by the Oakland Museum of California and the University Art Museum, Berkeley. Scheduled to open in September 1998, the exhibition ( the first to review, in depth, more than three decades of work) will include approximately 140 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, and will be seen simultaneously at both museums.

Co-curators Karen Tsujimoto, Senior Curator of Art at the Oakland Museum, and Dr. Jacquelynn Baas, Director of the University Art Museum, have decided to divide the retrospective thematically, so that each museum may show early, middle and later work. The two themes involve Brown's self-reflection and her relation to the world. The Oakland Museum will have self-portraits, and works dealing with family life and spiritual issues, while the University Art Museum will show works dealing with her relation to the wider world. There will be some overlap.

As a young artist, Brown studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), the key institution in the western U.S. to advance the ideas of abstract expressionism. Brown embraced the gesture and force of abstract expressionist paint handling and its intuitive approach to the creative process. In 1960, at the age of 22, she had her first solo exhibition in New York, at the Staempfli Gallery. She was involved in San Francisco Beatnik culture, and part of a circle that included the poets Michael McClure and Alan Ginsberg, and artists Jay De Feo, Wally Hedrick and Bruce Conner. In 1959 she was a founding member, along with Conner, Manuel Neri, Jess, and Wallace Berman, of the Rat Bastard Protective Society, an informal coterie that objected to the term "Beat," but which by its title symbolized the counter-culture ethos of the Beat generation.

Brown's reputation, based on her intensely painted canvases that synthesized figurative imagery with the dynamic gestures of abstract expressionism, grew towards the mid-'60s. Her paintings of this period firmly allied her with the work of her teachers and their contemporaries, among them Elmer Bischoff, David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. Brown's work, however, was set apart by its domestic subject matter: images of her young son, family pets, a Thanksgiving turkey and other kitchen still-lifes.

Then, in the mid-'60s, Brown retreated from the commercial art scene to refocus her art. Eventually, she made a decisive turn to more explicitly representational and symbolic imagery that was highly autobiographical and later, very spiritual. In 1990 she was installing one of her sculptures in India when the floor above her collapsed, crushing her and an American assistant.

The last major exhibition of Brown's work was at the University Art Museum in 1974. A catalog then published is out of print. The new exhibition provides the opportunity to publish a thoroughly researched monograph on the artist. There will be two essays addressing various aspects of Joan Brown's art and life. Tsujimoto will write the introductory essay chornicling the developement of Brown's work over 30 years. Baas will address the symbolic, psychological and spiritual elements that were a fundamental component of Brown's art. The book will be published and distributed by University of California Press.

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