Painted in mid-1960s New York, this self-portrait comes from a period when American artist Vivian Browne, newly trained at Hunter College, was concentrating on figuration and the relationships around her before turning to the more overtly satirical “Little Men” series and later her Africa and tree paintings. Here, she claims space as a working Black woman artist and not a model or symbol, but a painter surrounded by her tools, an art study in the background, and everyday objects. This vertical canvas shows Browne from the waist up, turned three-quarters toward us in a softly lit studio. Her medium-brown skin is modeled with greens, tans, and mauves that pool around her high cheekbones and strong jaw, giving her face a sculpted, shifting presence. Short dark hair with brown highlights frames an intent gaze with her eyes slightly widened, eyebrows arched, and full lips gently closed as if holding back speech. She wears a loose, rose-violet robe or coat that falls in broad planes rather than detailed folds. Behind her, a second canvas with a female figure in warm tones hangs on a pale wall, and a shallow wooden bowl rests on a ledge, anchoring the space. The background is built from creamy yellows and cool grays, so that the artist’s alert expression becomes the image’s brightest focal point. Her chromatic risks of green shadows on brown skin, mauve flesh against a yellow backdrop signal the experimental color that would define her later abstract works. The steady, complicated stare echoes her oft-quoted belief that “Black art is political,” yet the politics live in self-definition rather than slogan. Reintroduced in the traveling retrospective “Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest,” this self-portrait anchors the story of an artist whose portraiture, activism, and teaching insisted that Black women’s inner lives belonged at the center of American art.
“Vivian (Self-portrait)” by Vivian Browne (American) - Oil on canvas / 1965 - The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #VivianBrowne #Browne #ThePhillipsCollection #SelfPortrait #art #artText #BlueskyArt #BlackArt #BlackArtists #AfricanAmericanArtist #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists
