Vivian E. Browne (April 26, 1929–July 23, 1993) was an American artist. Born in Laurel, Florida, Browne was mostly known for her painting series called Little Men and her Africa series. She is also known for linking abstraction to nature in her tree paintings and in a series of abstract works made with layers of silk that were influenced by her travels to China.[1][2] She was an activist, professor, and has received multiple awards for her work. According to her mother, Browne died at age 64 from bladder cancer.[3]
She was invested in her travels across Europe and Africa, also studying at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria in 1972.[7] Browne worked at Rutgers University in Newark from 1971 to 1992 as a faculty member of the Arts and Sciences department while continuing as an artist in her own right with shows across the country.
In 2017, Browne was posthumously included in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, organized by the Brooklyn Museum.[12][13] In 2018, her work was also shown in Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, an exhibition at Hunter College that revisited the 1971 exhibition Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal organized by members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) to protest the Whitney Museum's refusal to appoint a Black curator for their survey Contemporary Black Artists in America.[14] Browne had been considered for the Whitney's exhibition but was ultimately not included.[15] She was a founding member of the BECC, with Benny Andrews, Cliff Joseph, Reginald Gammon, among others.[16] She showed at MoMA PS1's space in the Clocktower Gallery in 1986.[17]
In addition to her career as an artist, Browne was a teacher and professor, working in high schools and colleges throughout New York and New Jersey.[8] Browne joined the Rutgers University faculty in 1970, where she taught in the art department from 1975 to 1991. She taught the History of Black Art at Rutgers University, and served as chair of the department from 1975 to 1978. In 1985 she received full professorship at Rutgers, becoming the first African American, and second woman, to do so.[18]
Browne participated in activist movements in the New York art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Harlem on My Mind protest and BECC protests at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of Browne's works, particularly those from the 1960s, showcase her dissatisfaction with the struggles of growing up as a disenfranchised black woman. "Black art is political. If it's not political, it's not black art".[21] While she fought for equality, she was not optimistic about attitudes changing soon, and self categorized her look at art into two categories. "When I am political, I am painting as a black or as a woman or both. Otherwise, I am just a member of the human race."
In addition to serving as a professor and department chair at Rutgers, Browne was honored most notably for her political works showcasing her life as a black woman. She served as a Fulbright panelist in 1990, and spent much of her time in the 70s and 80s in exhibit curation and symposia. Her many experiences as a panelist include the 1971 NYC's Art Student's League's Symposium on Afro-American Art, the 1973, 1974 and 1976 National Conference of Artists and the NEA amongst others. She was also part of the Soho20 Chelsea,[3] a Broome Street gallery. Additionally, she has been featured in over 80 group and solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Orlando Gallery and the Black Art Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.[6]
Publications
2022 Vivian Browne - Africa Series, 1971-1974, exhibition catalog published by Ryan Lee Gallery
2021 The "Soul of a Nation" Reader: Writings by and about Black American Artists, 1960-1980, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., pg. 475
2019 Vivian Browne - Little Men, exhibition catalog published by Ryan Lee Gallery
1999 "Norman Lewis: Interview, August 29, 1974", Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History, no. 18
1998 SIGNS, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Cover Illustration, published by the University of Chicago
1998 African American Art, Oxford University Press pg.217
1998 Not for Sale: Cat and Art in the USA During the 1970s, a video tape and book by Laura Cottingham, Hawkeye Productions, New York, NY
^Heller, Jules; Heller, Nancy G. (1997). North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. ISBN978-0815325840.
^Campbell, Mary Schmidt (1985). Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973. New York, NY: Studio Museum in Harlem (published January 27 – June 30, 1985).
^Interview between Vivian Browne and James Hatch at her studio on Broadway Avenue, 1972. Part of the Hatch-Billops Oral History of Black Culture series.
