Frederick J. Brown

Frederick J. Brown (b. 1945-2012 American) had a long and prolific career producing work on religious, historical, and music-oriented themes in addition to his abstractions and portraiture of prominent Black leaders in jazz, blues and the arts. Brown’s paintings have been exhibited in shows at the Kemper, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, among many others. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery as well as the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo. In 1988, Brown had the first solo exhibition by a Western artist and African American at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution (now the National Museum of China) in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

Deeply influenced by music and his connection to jazz and blues artists, Brown spent his childhood in Chicago in a neighbourhood with the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and, later in Soho, New York, with jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and artists like Frank Bowling and Willem De Kooning. He once described his intention in painting as “trying to be as lyrical as possible, as smooth as Smokey Robinson.” Brown’s artistic practice ranged from abstraction to portraiture in which he captured the likenesses of notable and religious figures from Bill T. Jones, Tennessee Williams, Sherry Bronfman, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson to the Virgin Mary, Jesus and many more.

Frederick Brown was a rising artist in the New York contemporary art scene during the 70’s and 80’s, and his career shifted towards public art after his move with his family to Carefree, Arizona in 1989. He continued to paint, create large scale murals and ceramics until his death in 2012.