Brown, Joan, 1938-1990

Joan Brown was an artist.

From the description of Joan Brown papers, 1959-2002 (bulk 1970-1990). (University of California, Berkeley). WorldCat record id: 62767038

Painter, professor; San Francisco, Calif.; d. 1990.

Studied at the California School of Fine Arts 1955-1960 under Elmer Bischoff and others. Killed in an accident in Proddatura, India.

From the description of Joan Brown papers, 1955-1974. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 77979761

Joan Brown (1938-1990) is a painter from San Francisco, Calif.

Studied at the California School of Fine Arts 1955-1960 under Elmer Bischoff and others.

From the description of Oral history interview with Joan Brown, 1975 July 1-Sept. 9 [sound recording]. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 495595082

Painter; San Francisco, Calif. Died 1990.

Studied at the California School of Fine Arts 1955-1960 under Elmer Bischoff and others.

From the description of Joan Brown interviews, 1975 July 1-Sept. 9. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 220181700

Biographical Note

Born in San Francisco in 1938 and living her entire life in the Bay Area, Joan Vivien (Beatty) Brown would, at the time of her death in 1990, come to epitomize the style and philosophy of the Bay Area figurative tradition. Though her exposure to art during her childhood was minimal, upon graduating from high school in 1955 Brown experienced an artistic awakening when she by chance stumbled upon an advertisement in a local San Francisco newspaper for classes at the California School of Fine Art (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute). Longing to escape the confines of an unhappy and physically cramped home life, Brown submitted a small portfolio of pencil drawings of movie stars and was accepted for admission.

Her studies at CSFA brought her in contact with the first generation of the Bay Area Figurative School, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveria and Manuel Neri. After a bumpy and discouraging first year, Brown was encouraged to stay on by her soon-to-be husband and fellow student, William H. Brown. During the summer session of 1956, Joan Brown took a class with Elmer Bischoff, who was to play a decisive and mentoring role in Brown's continuing commitment to artmaking. Bischoff would prove to be a lifelong friend and professional colleague (years later, Brown and Bischoff were fellow faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Department).

Brown began to exhibit her work in 1957 and soon immersed herself in the Beat scene in San Francisco. With her husband, she moved to the white-hot center of Beat activity at 2330 Filmore Street, in 1958, the same building where artists Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, and poet Michael McClure lived. By the following year, however, Brown had separated from her husband and had moved in with artist Manuel Neri.

Brown's taste of artistic success came early, as by 1960, she had her first solo exhibition in New York at Staempfli Gallery, and was included in "Young America 1960 (Thirty Painters Under Thirty)" organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1962 Brown received the Merit Award for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Art from the publication, Mademoiselle. That same year she married Neri and gave birth to her only child, Noel Elmer Neri. With the pressures of success mounting, Brown withdrew from exhibiting in 1965 and began rethinking the direction of her art. Known for her oil on canvas figurative works utilizing bold color and generously thick impasto, Brown started anew with small, muted and thinly painted still lifes. She divorced Neri, the following year, after four years of marriage.

Regaining her artistic footing and marrying again toward the end of 1968, this time to fellow artist, Gordon Cook, the newlyweds moved to a small town in the Sacramento delta, only to return to San Francisco in 1971. During this time Brown became interested in Chinese art and symbolism and the following year switched her medium from oil on canvas to household enamel paint. Often painting on a masonite base, the enamel paint produced very flat and bright areas of color giving the work a faux naive quality.

From the early 1970's through the early 1980's, Brown also became an active swimmer, eventually training with Hall of Fame swimming coach Charlie Sava between 1972 and 1973. Her avid interest in swimming resulted in numerous paintings dealing with the sport and its effects on her emotionally and physically.

In 1974, Brown had her first retrospective exhibition at the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley and was appointed assistant professor of the Department of Art Practice at U.C. Berkeley the same year. Despite Brown's distrust of the art world and its concomitant commercialism, she continued to show extensively during the 1970's, being included in important exhibitions such as, "1977 Biennial Exhibition: Contemporary American Art" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the seminal show, "Bad Painting," at the New Museum, New York. Awards continued to mount as well, as Brown was recipient of an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship in 1976 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1977. However, her marriage to Gordon Cook disintegrated in 1976. During the late 1970's Brown's often autobiographical paintings began to deal more directly with the themes of spirituality, mysticism and metaphysics. It was her trip to Egypt in 1977, the first of several excursions to sites of important archeological significance, that so decisively prepared the groundwork for her later work that dealt almost exclusively with spiritualism and symbolism filtered through her subjective experience.

Brown remarried in 1980 to Michael Hebel, a police officer and attorney who shared her esoteric interests. For their honeymoon they traveled to India, and it was there that Brown had an encounter with the spiritual leader, Sathya Sai Baba. From this initial contact, Brown became a fervent devotee and was to make numerous return trips to India to visit Sai Baba's ashram near the southern city of Puttaparthi.

By the mid 1980's, Brown became increasingly interested in public art as a response to her ever growing disdain for the commercial gallery system, which she viewed as too exclusive and insular. With a passionate idealism that art should and could reach common people, she was to complete many large scale projects for numerous government, corporate, retail and civic spaces both in the Bay Area and nationally. Often these public sculptures would take the form of large brightly colored ceramic-tiled obelisks (reaching, at times, in excess of forty feet). Brown's final work of public art, designed as a celebration of Sai Baba's sixty-fifth birthday, played a role in her death. She was in the process of installing an obelisk at Sai Baba's spiritual museum of the world then under construction near his ashram, when a portion of the building's turret gave way, instantly killing her and an assistant.

Joan Brown's highly personal and deeply felt art not only reflected her unembarrassed forthrightness and sincerity, but was a source of inspiration for younger artists, many of whom came to U.C. Berkeley's Art Department to study with her. Brown demonstrated that her distinctive approach to making art, created from the fabric, thoughts, and experiences of her everyday life, did so without sacrificing a more universal appeal.

From the guide to the Joan Brown papers, 1959-2002, n.d., (The Bancroft Library)