Joan Brown resented the easy commodification of her work, and the incessant demand for her to create something just so others could own it.
Joan Brown
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Unearthing a Treasure Trove of Bay Area Women Abstract Painters
The Long View amply demonstrates that Jay DeFeo and Joan Brown may be the best known Bay Area women artists who worked in abstraction, but they were far from alone.
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The Sweet Chaos of the Bay Area’s Artistic Heritage
Way Bay visualizes the currents of unbridled creativity that have coursed and flowed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area over the last two centuries.
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A Celebration of the Rat Bastards: Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, and Others
Shortly after coming to San Francisco, Conner formed what he christened the “Rat Bastard Society.” Conner told the curator Peter Boswell that the name was fitting for “people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society.”
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Looking Back at the Strange and Surly History of Bay Area Funk Art
It is disheartening to see this 50th anniversary of the seminal exhibition Funk pass by without so much as a nod from the art world.
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More than Meets the Eye
If you see lots of work by different artists, you are going to make your own connections.
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An Endless Succession of Roles: Joan Brown’s Self-Portraits
When Joan Brown began attending the California School of Fine Arts in 1955, she was immediately dissatisfied with her classes and the structure of art education in general.
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Can We Still Learn To Speak Martian?
Let us start with two addresses just a few blocks from each other in San Francisco, and what was happening there in the early and mid-1950s. On Halloween, 1954, the Six Gallery opened at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The six founders were Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, David Simpson, John Ryan and Jack Spicer. Their shared interest was to have a place to exhibit art and host literary events, to put art and poetry on the walls, side by side. At the debut exhibition, Spicer’s poems were in fact on the wall, just like the paintings and drawings of the other co-founders.