Frederick J. Brown

American, 1945 - 2012

BiographyFrederick James Brown (1945-2012) was a New York City and Arizona-based American artist. Drawing from his African American and Native American ancestry, and breadth of knowledge in art historical tradition, Brown’s work engages with American history and music, the urban fabric, religion, and spirituality.

Born in Georgia and raised in Chicago’s South Side, Brown settled in a loft in Soho during the New York Art Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s. There, he collaborated with jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton, and abstract expressionist painter Willem De Kooning among others. The 2002 documentary film 120 Wooster Street depicts Frederick Brown’s loft studio, which grew to be a central gathering place for artists, musicians, writers, dancers and performance artists. Eventually, Brown settled in Arizona and continued to paint in New York and Scottsdale.

Brown’s work is in public and private art collections throughout the world, including the American Jazz Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem. Brown’s one-man exhibitions include Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues, and Other Icons (2002) (curated by Lowry Stokes Sims; traveled to the Kemper Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem), Marlborough Gallery, and a twenty-year retrospective held at the National Museum of China in Beijing in 1988, one of the first solo exhibitions by a western artist in China.

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