ARTICLE | Capturing the essence of the musicians and the music: Frederick Brown's "Energy is Jazz" exhibition at the American Jazz Museum
January 2, 2024 - Harold Smith for KC Studio Magazine
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
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