Joan Brown
b. San Francisco, California, 1938–1990
Nun with Staffordshire Terrier
1961
Oil on canvas
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.685)
About Museums Without Men
Celebrated art historian Katy Hessel has launched an audio guide series highlighting the women and gender-nonconforming artists in the public collections of international museums. Museums Without Men is an ever-growing series that introduces museum visitors to underrepresented and often lesser-known artists, opening up collections to new and existing audiences who will be able to follow the audio stops while in the galleries or online. The series links public institutions globally, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Tate Britain, London, to foreground the important work that museums and galleries do by collecting and displaying women and gender-nonconforming artists, whether historical or contemporary.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Joan Brown, Nun with Staffordshire Terrier (1961). A luminous palette, bold brush strokes with thick scratchy textures, jazzy tiles that feel almost rhythmic. This is Joan Brown’s Nun with Staffordshire Terrier from 1961. Joan Brown was somewhat of a legend in the 1950s and 60s Bay area figurative movement.
An art scene which rivaled the East Coast’s abstract expressionism. I love to look at this surface closely, at the gestural, action like strokes that make up simple shapes, forming a figure of a nun, set against a blazing red background, resting in a green armchair, and potentially sewing a pink blanket.
With her animated Staffordshire Terrier painted in golden hues, looking sharply to its left. This sort of composition and subject is typical for [00:01:00] Brown. She painted those around her, and her work often features a single female figure set in a domestic environment. Here, we meet a nun, dressed in her veil.
But while we don’t know who this figure is specifically, Brown was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic school, although this education caused her to abandon the religion. I love the playfulness of this work. Brown lures us in with her intense colouring and everyday scenery, but she didn’t stay in this style long.
Always experimenting, her later work became more spiritual, and then she moved towards sculpture and focused on non Western subjects, such as Hinduism and Egyptian icons. Brown exhibited all over the world, but in 1990, her life was cut short. When installing a mosaic sculpture in a temple in India, the ceiling collapsed, [00:02:00] resulting in a fatal tragedy.
But Brown’s energy and zest for making lives on through her work. And how lucky are we that we can still get to know this woman, who constantly experimented and paved the way for the West Coast art scene through her intimate paintings, drenched in luminosity.
