Joan Brown, feelings, critics, the hell with it
“I’m not any one thing: I’m not just a teacher, I’m not just a mother, I’m not just a painter, I’m all of these things, plus.” —Joan Brown
for C.S.S.
Joan Brown was often getting the hell out of places. Dancing out of marriages, swimming across the San Francisco Bay, escaping an unhappy childhood home. Joan Brown! Joan Brown! I’ve wanted to type in my drafts, as though there were no more essential way to summon her exuberant life and art than to exclaim her name. Joan Brown!
In 1958, twenty-year-old art student Joan Brown lived with her first husband, Bill, in a house on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street. The couple’s next door neighbors were artists Jay DeFeo and her husband, Wally Hedrick. The atmosphere was such an intense exchange of work and fun—Hedrick brewed beer in the bathtub, Joan and Jay loved to dance, gin and drug-powered marathon parties followed—the couples bashed a hole in the wall between their apartments for easier access. Joan Brown!
“The energy level was so damn high,” Brown said:
“Everybody felt extremely optimistic, in a wonderful sense. Not in a monetary sense because there wasn’t anything here, and when you don’t have anything like that, there’s a freedom that is terrific.”
When New York gallery owner George Staempfli visited DeFeo’s studio in 1959, he stepped through the hole-in-the-wall into Joan’s place and bought two paintings on the spot. She hadn’t yet earned her BFA and thought the $300 check was “phony.”
The check cleared, and Staempfli returned to buy six more of Joan’s paintings, booked her for a two-artist show in New York the following year, and paid her a monthly stipend. (Brown later wrote Staempfli that she needed her own studio; “I'm sick of men,” she explained.)
“Buoyed,” writes Donna Seaman in the wonderful Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, “she extracted herself from two untenable situations.” Joan moved out of Fillmore Street and left her husband Bill.
“Although I couldn’t put it in the words that I’m saying now, I could put it in simple terms. I got sick of people coming over. And I got sick of a party every time I turned around. I got sick of drinking so damn much gin, which, of course, is my own fault and responsibility…I just got damn fed up with it. I realized it was cutting in my privacy, which I very much need. So I got the hell out of there. I left.”
I first heard Joan Brown’s name about four months ago and saw her work in person a couple months after that. It’s easy to love her paintings, their electrified palette, sense of humor, and attention to everyday detail. Though she was dead serious about art, her work appeals to me partly for its lack of self-seriousness.
“My work has dealt with introspection…I’m constantly trying to pull out new information from my intuitive self, which results in the surprises that I discover in my work, and which keeps me stimulated.”
And then there was her son, Noel. Had I ever seen a mother-and-son self-portrait by an artist? If I had, I couldn’t think of one. The teddy bear, the Giants cap, Joan’s crewneck sweatshirt, the fall leaves. I was instantly enamored.
Because I didn’t know anything about Joan Brown, it was easy to think, erroneously, she had emerged from the fog, wholly “undiscovered” until fall 2022 when SFMOMA opened an exhibition on the artist.
As I learned about Brown, though, her career trajectory seemed both traditional and charmed: BFA, MFA, early gallery representation. From her first solo New York exhibition in 1960, The Museum of Modern Art purchased her painting Thanksgiving Turkey. Prominent traveling exhibitions, including 1960’s Women in American Art, alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Georgia O’Keeffe, more solo shows. Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants. The worn path to the canon.
“She was so determined to paint what she wanted to paint and how she wanted to paint it.”
—Nancy Lim
Brown, as she appears in her self-portraits, is part hippie and part jock, a lone witch as well as a suburban mother. —Lisa Liebmann
But she’s not there, not consistently, for a few reasons. Despite her early commercial success, Brown couldn’t get a decent teaching job for many years. She was a mother. And like Ana Mendieta, her work changed over the course of her career, making her position in the history of art harder to pinpoint. San Francisco’s relative isolation from New York and Los Angeles worked to Brown’s advantage during her lifetime offering creative freedom. After her death, San Francisco worked against her, as the art historical record grouped her with a regionalist school of painters.
For me—mother to a three-year-old, published author of self-portraiture now experimenting with other forms, teaching creating writing outside the ivory tower on Zoom—Brown’s zig-zaggy, personalized path inspires and thrills.
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