Kay Brown (artist)

Last updated
Kay Brown
Kay Brown head.jpg
Born1932 (1932)
Died2012 (aged 7980)
Known for Painting
Printmaking
Collage
Movement Black Arts Movement

Kay Brown (1932-2012) was an African American artist, Printmaker, published author, Graphic and Fashion designer. She graduated at New York City College in 1968, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She was also a graduate at Howard University in 1986 with a Master of Fine Arts degree. [1] Brown became the first woman awarded a membership into the Weusi Artist Collective, based in Harlem during the 1960s and 1970s. The Weusi Collective, named for the Swahili word for “blackness”, was founded in 1965, composed entirely of men. The fact that she was the only female member of this collective inspired her to seek out ways of representing the neglected Black female artists. She is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of the Where We At Black women artists' collective in New York City. Brown's works are credited for representing issues that affected the global Black community via her mixed media collages and prints. Brown's work was featured in the "We Wanted a Revolution" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Contents

Career

Brown coupled with fiber artist Dindga McCannon and formed "Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) during the spring of 1971. [2] Topics covered through artistic expression within this organization were contemporary social conditions such as the Black female/male relationship, African traditions, and the Black family as a unit. She also wrote an article based on her involvement in the Exhibition and how she contribute to it. [3] Brown also wrote a young adult novel, Willy's Summer Dream, which was published in 1989. Ms. Brown was also a published author of two novels. The novel that is largely discussed is Willy’sSummer Dream, inspired by the life of her only son. Her son is also noted in part as the inspiration for her “Black Mother and Male Child” etching. Brown was a staff member at the Medgar Evers College and an assistant professor at the Anne Arundel Community College from 1989 to 1990. Brown's work was a part of the Black Arts Movement which was a collaboration of black artists, visual artists musicians, and poets. [4]

Vertical files for Kay Brown are in the Evans-Tibbs Collection of the National Gallery of Art Library. [5] Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson. [6]

Works

Kay Brown was a sociopolitical printmaker specializing in the expressions of the Black narrative she witnessed personally. Brown also used large format collages to help express her agenda.

There have been some articles where she has been mentioned. According to Mutual Art, Kay Brown has been featured in articles for the AnOther, and the ArtDaily (According to MutualArt). Also, according to Mutual Art, in August 2020, her most recent article was Women Artists of Colour in the Spotlight of Wiki Edit-A-Thon written for the H A P P E N I N G.

Exhibitions

Her work can be seen in multiple exhibitions, which can be found at several galleries and museums.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aquatint</span> Tonal printmaking technique

Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used historically to print in colour, both by printing with multiple plates in different colours, and by making monochrome prints that were then hand-coloured with watercolour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorraine O'Grady</span> American artist

Lorraine O'Grady is an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explores the cultural construction of identity – particularly that of Black female subjectivity – as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist at age forty-five. Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist art movement in the United States</span> Promoting the study, creation, understanding, and promotion of womens art, began in 1970s

The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emma Amos (painter)</span> American painter (1937–2020)

Emma Amos was a postmodern African-American painter and printmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Goldthwaite</span> American artist and advocate of womens rights (1869–1944)

Anne Goldthwaite was an American painter and printmaker and an advocate of women's rights and equal rights. Goldthwaite studied art in New York City. She then moved to Paris where she studied modern art, including Fauvism and Cubism, and became a member of a circle that included Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. She was a member of a group of artists that called themselves Académie Moderne and held annual exhibitions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chaim Koppelman</span> American painter

Chaim Koppelman was an American artist, art educator, and Aesthetic Realism consultant. Best known as a printmaker, he also produced sculpture, paintings, and drawings. A member of the National Academy of Design since 1978, he was president of the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA), which presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. He established the Printmaking Department of the School of Visual Arts in 1959, and taught there until 2007.

Sarah Brayer is an American artist who works in both Japan and the United States. She is internationally known for her poured washi paperworks, aquatint and woodblock prints. In 2013 Japan's Ministry of Culture awarded Sarah its Bunkacho Chokan Hyosho for dissemination of Japanese culture abroad through her creations in Echizen washi. She currently resides in Kyoto, Japan and New York, U.S.A.

"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and used it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dindga McCannon</span> American artist (born 1947)

Dindga McCannon is an African-American artist, fiber artist, muralist, teacher author and illustrator. She co-founded the collective Where We At, Black Women Artists in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maren Hassinger</span> African-American artist and educator (born 1947)

Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivian E. Browne</span> American artist

Vivian E. Browne 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. 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.

Weusi Artist Collective is an organization of African-American artists, established in 1965, based in the Harlem section of New York City. Inspired by the Black Arts Movement, the members of the Weusi Artist Collective create art invoking African themes and symbols. The organization was a major driving force behind the development, production and dissemination of black art in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alva Rogers</span>

Alva Rogers is an American playwright, composer, actor, vocalist, and arts educator. She is known for the use of dolls and puppetry in interdisciplinary work. Rogers performed in the role of Eula Peazant in Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust. and was a vocalist in the New York City alternative rock band Band of Susans.

Barbara Jones-Hogu was an African-American artist best known for her work with the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and for co-founding the artists' collective AfriCOBRA.

Carole Marie Byard was an American visual artist, illustrator, and photographer. She was an award-winning illustrator of children's books, and the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, as well as multiple Coretta Scott King Awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985</span>

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 was an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art from April 21, 2017, through September 17, 2017 surveying the last twenty years of black female art. The exhibition was organized thematically, presenting forty artists and activists whose work was dedicated to the fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and class injustice.

Ann Graves Tanksley is an American artist. Her mediums are representational oils, watercolor and printmaking. One of her most noteworthy bodies of work is a collection based on the writings of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The Hurston exhibition is a two hundred plus piece collection of monotypes and paintings. It toured the United States on and off from 1991 through 2010.

Rodeo Caldonia also known as Rodeo Caldonia High Fidelty Performance Theater was a black feminist arts collective based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn during the 1980s. The collective, which operated from about 1985-1988, included nearly 20 African American women who wanted to create feminist work that focused on their identities as Black women. The collective was founded by Lisa Jones and Alva Rogers.

Sandy and Her Husband is a 1973 painting by the postmodern African-American painter and printmaker Emma Amos (1937-2020). In 2018 the painting was acquired directly from the artist's collection by the Cleveland Museum of Art after having been shown as the centerpiece of the exhibition "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85" at the Brooklyn Museum. The painting actually contains a painting of another Amos painting "Flower Sniffer" (1966), which is a self portrait, and thus the artist was also able to insert herself into the later painting. In addition "Flower Sniffer" was exhibited at the Brooklym Museum to corresponding visual and historical effect. It is considered one of if not the most important work by Amos.

Derin Young is an American cultural programmer, producer, songwriter, sound designer, and vocalist. She was a member of Rodeo Caldonia High Fidelity Performance Theater.

References

  1. 1 2 Farrington, Lisa (2017). African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 283–284. ISBN   9780199995394.
  2. Tugui, D (December 21, 2018). "13 Black Women Artists To Know". Black Excellence. Retrieved February 22, 2021.
  3. Brown, Kay (April 1972). ""Where We At Black Women Artists"". The Feminist Art Journal. 1 via JSTOR.
  4. Foster, Hannah (2014-03-21). "The Black Arts Movement (1965-1975) •" . Retrieved 2023-05-02.
  5. "Kay Brown : vertical files". NGA Library. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
  6. "Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 24 January 2022.
  7. 1 2 "Where We At Black Women Artists' Collective. Weusi Artist Collective KAY BROWN (1932 - 2012)". Joel Elgin Athraigh Print Studio. Retrieved 2023-05-05.
  8. Painter, Nell Irvin (2006). Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. Oxford University Press. p. 421. ISBN   9780195137552.
  9. Brooklyn Museum. "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (Exhibition)". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
  10. California African American Museum. "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (Exhibition)". www.caamuseum.org. Retrieved 2020-04-06.
  11. Albright-Knox Gallery. "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (Exhibition)". www.albrightknox.org. Retrieved 2020-04-06.