Frederick J. Brown

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANNA PETROW.

Have you dreamed of sipping rosé with Matisse or dining with Duchamp? It’s all possible at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s Cafe Sebastienne. The cafe itself is a piece of art, and the dining hall and its patrons are an integral part of the art installation. 

The Cafe Sebastienne dining room is lined from floor to ceiling with paintings by the late American artist Frederick J. Brown, who died in 2012. The installation, called The History of Art, features 110 oil paintings, each representing an important movement or figure in art throughout the ages. The works cover the cafe’s seven irregular walls, and they can cleverly be identified via a “map” found on the back of the menu. Dining in the cafe is an immersive experience.

“The series reflects the words of my mentor Willem de Kooning, who once told me, ‘Remember that art is a very old profession—it began with a shaman in a cave,’” Brown said at the time of the permanent installation in 1999.

Dave Popkin/American Jazz Museum

As the old line goes, "Jazz was born in New Orleans, but it grew up in Kansas City," so it was appropriate that in 1997, the American Jazz Museum opened its doors at one of the most important jazz crossroads in the world- 18th and Vine in Kansas City. The museum serves as a vibrant performance, exhibition, education, and research space. The day I attended there was a wonderful art exhibit of Frederick J. Brown, featuring his oversized oil portraits of legends like Big Joe Turner, Thelonious Monk, and Etta James. - continue reading

If you are a patron of Kansas City's art or jazz community, then you have seen the painterly work of the late artist Frederick James Brown. Two large, elegant portraits, one of Charlie Parker and the other of Count Basie, permanently adorn the atrium interior at the American Jazz Museum in the 18th and Vine District. Halfway across the city, Cafe Sebastienne at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art contains an intimate dining room with a floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 100 paintings by Brown expressing his rendition of art history.

In 2002, a traveling exhibition of Brown's work, focusing on his portraits of jazz and blues luminaries, premiered simultaneously at Kemper Museum and the American Jazz Museum. Titled "Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues, & Other Icons," the exhibit then traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Born in Georgia and raised in Chicago, Brown graduated in 1968 from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a degree in art. He lived and worked in the SoHo district of New York City for decades. Along the way, he taught at various colleges including one in Beijing, China. His 1988 retrospective of mo works at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution made Brown one of the earliest Western artists to exhibit in China. Brown passed away in 2012, at the age of 67.

In October, Brown's "Energy is Jazz" exhibition, co-curated by the American Jazz Museum and Bentley Brown of the Frederick J. Brown Trust, opened at the American Jazz Museum. While the world has changed in innumerable ways since Brown's last exhibition at the AJM, the sheer energy collected, refined and expressed in Brown's work continues to astound. - continue reading

(From the left: Stanley Boxer, Sosoughtbloomnaught, 1976; Frederick J. Brown, Jacques Lipchitz, 1992-1993; John Opper, Untitled (#16), 1969; Stanley Boxer, Softlashtendercombs, 1976)

"Throughout the room, anniversary collection fabric, carpet and furniture frames came together in signature Young Huh style. The designer and her team debuted the iconic Tree of Life pattern as a wallcovering. Artwork from Berry Campbell, fireplace accessories from Chesneys and florals from Diane James Home completed the luxe ambiance." - continue reading

Frederick J. Brown, Portrait of Etta James, American Jazz Museum

OPENING OCTOBER 26, 2023: Energy is Jazz, an exhibition of works by American artist, Frederick J. Brown

The American Jazz Museum presents Energy is Jazz, an exhibition of works by esteemed American artist, Frederick J. Brown. The exhibition has been co-curated between The American Jazz Museum and Bentley Brown of the Frederick J. Brown Trust. The exhibit will explore Brown's career and his depiction of jazz artists in portraiture, in addition to the energy and feeling of jazz through visual representation.

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.