American figurative painter Joan Brown (1938-1990) was a San Francisco native. She studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), and while still a student she had her first solo gallery exhibition in 1958.
Two years later, at 22, her colorful work — sometimes inaptly described as “cartoonish” — was included in Young America 1960 (Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
SFMOMA is now showing eighty of the late Bay Area artist’s painting and sculptures including ‘After the Alcatraz Swim #3’. (Brown swam in the first women’s Golden Gate swim in San Francisco Bay, and nearly drowned during a swim to Alcatraz Island.)
[Below: Joan Brown, Woman Preparing for a Shower (1975)]
The Joan Brown retrospective at SFMOMA is “the most expansive presentation on the artist’s work in more than twenty years, charting the turns and devotions of a vision that was once dismissed by critics as unserious but was rooted firmly in impassioned curiosity and research and remains uniquely compelling today.”
Janet Bishop, the Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, said in a statement: “We are thrilled to present Joan Brown, a reassessment of the unabashedly personal, defiantly independent and enduringly relevant career of one of San Francisco’s most important local heroes.”
[Below: Joan Brown. Woman Waiting in a Restaurant, 1975, Enamel on canvas, 96 x 72 inches (243.8 x 182.9 cm)]
Joan Brown died in 1990 while in India installing an exhibition of her work in a reflecting pool at the then-new Heritage Museum, which was under construction. Colleagues said “a concrete turret from a balcony collapsed and fell on her.” She was 52.
[Below: Joan Brown, Self Portrait with Fish and Cat (Detail), 1970. Enamel on Masonite, 96 × 48 in (243.8 × 121.9 cm)]
Joan Brown is on view at SFMOMA on Floor 7 from November 19, 2022 to March 12, 2023.
