Biography brown frederick james picture

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 s and s. There, he collaborated with jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton, and abstract expressionist painter Willem De Kooning among others.

The documentary film  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 Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the American Jazz Museum.

Brown’s one-man exhibitions include the Studio Museum of Harlem, Marlborough Gallery and a twenty-year retrospective held at the National Museum of China in Beijing in , one of the first solo exhibitions by a western artist in China.

Major art projects include his version of The Last Supper;  The Assumption of Mary, a three-story tall mural painted in at Xavier University in New Orleans; The History of Art, a group of interlocking paintings at Café Sebastienne in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art created in the s; and his extensive series of over portraits of jazz and blues musicians.