Frederick J. Brown

A mural for Lima jazz legend Joe Henderson has already been created downtown, and on April 27, Lima schools will add another posthumous honor to add to Henderson’s legacy.

Following its debut at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2021, the group exhibition Black American Portraits travels to Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

Join us for a virtual conversation that delves into the artistic practice of Frederick J. Brown with noted American art historian and curator Lowery Stokes Sims, who contributed a new essay to Frederick J. Brown: A Drawing in Five Parts, and the artist’s son, Bentley Brown, Adjunct Professor of Art History at Fordham University and PhD Fellow, NYU Institute of Fine Arts. The conversation is moderated by Director and CEO Masha Turchinsky.

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LACMA has added two American portraits: a full-length Robert Henri Spanish Dancer and Frederick J. Brown's portrait of L.A. art patron Dr. Leon Banks.

Abby and Alan D. Levy pledged the Henri to LACMA on the museum's 40th anniversary (2005), and the gift was made official this year. Henri's series of Spanish dancers against velveteen backgrounds show his admiration for Velázquez and Goya. Measuring 85 by 44-5/8 in, it joins a set of Ash Can School works at LACMA that includes three smaller Henris and George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers.

The Metropolitan Museum bought one of Henri's Spanish subjects (not nearly so compelling as the Levy picture) out of the 1913 Armory Show. Within a few years Henri's Spanish naturalism had been overtaken by the modernism of Picasso and Miró.

Frederick J. Brown (1945-2012) was a Chicago-born African-American artist who moved in New York's avant-garde circles of visual art, jazz, and blues. The portrait of Dr. Leon Banks is a study for Brown's monumental Last Supper (1984), a painting honoring men important to the artist's life and career. Dr. Banks is a retired Los Angeles pediatrician, co-founder of the California African American Museum, and a former MOCA board member. He's also known as the subject of several David Hockney portraits. The Brown painting was purchased this May from Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, with funds from the Modern and Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions Endowment.

Order/Reorder: Experiments with Collections
Hudson River Museum, New York
June 17, 2022–September 3, 2023
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Frederick J. Brown, The First Time Around, 1985, oil and pencil on paper, 42 x 29 3/4 inches.

Art as both creative output and curated object is in constant dialogue with the past and the present. It is this never-ending conversation that pushes art into its future, forcing us to continually reimagine the ways in which we project a vision of ourselves and the world around us. Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections explores approaches to looking at American art that consider expressions of American identity from new perspectives.

The works on view range across genres: portraiture, figural studies, still life, landscape, and abstraction. Recent additions to the Museum’s collection and other artworks on view for the first time are joined by visitor favorites, paired with special loans from the Joslyn Art Museum and contributions from regional artists. Rather than structured chronologically, the installation is designed to spark discussion through juxtapositions of styles, outlooks, and eras. Works by renowned artists are in conversation with those now emerging.

Frederick J. Brown: Acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Frederick J. Brown
Dr. Leon Banks (Study for Last Supper), 1982
Oil on linen
32 x 24 1/4 inches
Signed, dated and titled on verso

Join art historian Bentley Brown for a walk through African American Art in the 20th Century to discuss the importance of how African American artists have framed the narratives in which they see themselves through medium, context, and storytelling throughout the twentieth century. In the course of this conversational tour, Brown will make a special stop at the signature work, John Henry, an imposing 1979 oil painting by his father, Frederick Brown.

Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and doctoral student at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. His research at the Institute explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid 1980s. In his artistic practice, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage, and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.

Saturday, December 11, 2021
1pm
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Hudson River Museum, New York | African American Art in the 20th Century

Frederick J. Brown: The Sound of Color