The Brooklyn Rail

Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest reintroduces a forgotten artistic figure whose visibility was—like many Black female art practitioners—squashed by the racism and misogyny of the art world of the late twentieth century. Although Browne, who lived from 1929 to 1993, was in the same circuit as Faith Ringgold and Howardena Pindell, she has not had an equivalent renaissance in recent years, barring RYAN LEE Gallery in New York showing her work in 2019 and 2022.

In an undated artist statement, Browne noted that her “formal art training was based on the Cézanne aesthetic.” She began painting while teaching, prior to working as an art supervisor at the New York Board of Education, debuting as an artist with “Little Men”—one hundred works on paper and oil paintings on canvas, produced in just four months—based on the superintendents, the principals, and the coordinators (all maddening) from the scholastic system. The men were “little” as in “trivial”: obnoxious administrators with bloated senses of self-importance, embodiments of the grotesque whom the artist deservedly depicted as ghoulish and peevish. These are perfect representations of a kind of blowhard white middle-aged man with a distorted sense of his own power.

Thereafter, Browne pursued various artistic experimentations, dabbling both in abstraction and figuration during different eras of her life. Browne’s use of silk as a support on which she created her images further intensified their sensorial quality. She was well-traveled within Europe, visited Cuba, China, and spent several weeks in Nigeria; these changes of backdrop inspired her and informed aesthetic pivots. In a self-portrait from 1965 (where the Cézanne influence is clear in the brushwork and colors), the artist gazes directly at the viewer while donning a pink robe, standing by a work featuring a voluptuous and faceless female nude. In a totally different vein, the oil on canvas work, For You (1974), used on the cover of this monograph, features loose gauzy shapes in yellow, violet, and teal against a dusky cerulean background (or as art historian Lowery Stokes Sims wrote of Browne’s aesthetic in one essay, “vaguely biomorphic forms engulfed by and emerging from a misty ambiance”). Ten years later, Browne produced the acrylic on canvas Oaks (1984), a thicket of black branches with yellow, blue, and orange undertones. Her nature bent is again in full effect in Metasequoia #13 from 1987—dense, lush, alive in a luminous bustle with swirling strokes, celebrating a dawn redwood genus of fast-growing coniferous trees.

The book is not only about Browne’s career but also a wider meditation on what it means to express dissent and how radical one has to be in funneling one’s political views into one’s work, especially as a BIPOC figure. Browne was at her prime during an era during which many activist cohorts mobilized. She was a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Inc. (BECC) in 1969, a group that protested the Whitney’s Three Centuries of American Art show in 1976, which included one woman and no Black artists. In a text by art historian Darby English, he notes: “Being an individual personality wondering how to become itself was Browne’s protest,” a choice in willful opposition to being overly reliant on the group, which “meant less space in an artist’s life for spontaneous exercises of curiosity, to Browne the very stuff of life.” This sense of the collective marshaled to make a statement was not something Browne felt obligated to translate into her paintings. A text by art historian Adrienne L. Childs concurs with English, noting: “Browne was difficult to place in narratives that privileged art as an expression of racial identity above all else.” Amara Antilla put it more bluntly: “Browne’s oeuvre is marked by an unwavering commitment to challenging the expectations and assumptions that were projected onto her, and to resisting the unequal treatment of women and Black people more broadly.” That is to say, Browne’s values were reflected in her work subtly, not overtly, and that perhaps not centering the Black body has kept her on the sidelines, as this embodied symbolism has new urgency in a society anxiously trying to correct a history of omission. The recent show Paris noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950–2000, on view this spring at the Centre Pompidou in France, only recently gave pride of place to Black artists with abstract artistic tendencies like Bill Hutson (1936–2022) and Ed Clark (1926–2019). As for Browne, she “wasn't a messaging artist,” English affirms. What makes her a formidable creator is that, instead, “she was comfortable with uncertainty and painted towards an observer she credited with a similar tolerance.”