Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest
Edited by Adrienne L. Childs and Amara Antilla
Giles, in association with the Phillips Collection, 2025
Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest reintroduces a forgotten artistic figure whose visibility was—like many Black female art practitioners—squashed by the racism and misogyny of the art world of the late twentieth century. Although Browne, who lived from 1929 to 1993, was in the same circuit as Faith Ringgold and Howardena Pindell, she has not had an equivalent renaissance in recent years, barring RYAN LEE Gallery in New York showing her work in 2019 and 2022.
In an undated artist statement, Browne noted that her “formal art training was based on the Cézanne aesthetic.” She began painting while teaching, prior to working as an art supervisor at the New York Board of Education, debuting as an artist with “Little Men”—one hundred works on paper and oil paintings on canvas, produced in just four months—based on the superintendents, the principals, and the coordinators (all maddening) from the scholastic system. The men were “little” as in “trivial”: obnoxious administrators with bloated senses of self-importance, embodiments of the grotesque whom the artist deservedly depicted as ghoulish and peevish. These are perfect representations of a kind of blowhard white middle-aged man with a distorted sense of his own power.
Thereafter, Browne pursued various artistic experimentations, dabbling both in abstraction and figuration during different eras of her life. Browne’s use of silk as a support on which she created her images further intensified their sensorial quality. She was well-traveled within Europe, visited Cuba, China, and spent several weeks in Nigeria; these changes of backdrop inspired her and informed aesthetic pivots. In a self-portrait from 1965 (where the Cézanne influence is clear in the brushwork and colors), the artist gazes directly at the viewer while donning a pink robe, standing by a work featuring a voluptuous and faceless female nude. In a totally different vein, the oil on canvas work, For You (1974), used on the cover of this monograph, features loose gauzy shapes in yellow, violet, and teal against a dusky cerulean background (or as art historian Lowery Stokes Sims wrote of Browne’s aesthetic in one essay, “vaguely biomorphic forms engulfed by and emerging from a misty ambiance”). Ten years later, Browne produced the acrylic on canvas Oaks (1984), a thicket of black branches with yellow, blue, and orange undertones. Her nature bent is again in full effect in Metasequoia #13 from 1987—dense, lush, alive in a luminous bustle with swirling strokes, celebrating a dawn redwood genus of fast-growing coniferous trees.