To celebrate Black History Month, I am posting some work of one Black visual artist from history per day.
For February 2nd, I am posting work by Vivian Browne. (2/2)
#BlackHistoryMonth #VivianBrowne #painter

To celebrate Black History Month, I am posting some work of one Black visual artist from history per day.
For February 2nd, I am posting work by Vivian Browne. (1/2)
#BlackHistoryMonth #VivianBrowne #painter

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

{2025 New Release} Vivian Browne : My Kind of Protest by: Amara Antilla, Adrienne L. Childs A long overdue volume which re-establishes Vivian Browne as an important and dynamic American artist with an expressive hand and expansive world view. Vivian Browne’s (1929-1993) varied career spanned more than three decades, from her early portraits and landscapes in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, her Little Men series of 1966-69, through her final San Joaquin and King’s Canyon paintings of the very early 1990s, completed just before her death in 1993.

Offers a fresh contextualization of the artist, placing her at the forefront of the conversations on power and politics, representation and identity. #art #VivianBrowne

My essay on the brilliant, timely #VivianBrowne #MyKindOfProtest exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati is up now! Thanks to everyone who’s helped put this together. 🌹
www.theartblog.org/2025/03/figu...

“Seven Deadly Sins” ca. 1968
Oil on canvas
Featured in “Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest”
Edited by Adrienne L. Childs & Amara Antilla
Publishing April w/ #PhillipsMuseum

#art #books #protest #protestart #VivianBrowne #AfricanAmericanArt #AmericanArt #SevenDeadlySins
gilesltd.com/product/vivi...

“Seven Deadly Sins” ca. 1968
Oil on canvas.
Featured in “Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest”
Edited by Adrienne L. Childs & Amara Antilla
Publishing April w/ #PhillipsMuseum

#artbooks #protest #protestart #VivianBrowne #AfricanAmericanArt #AmericanArt #SevenDeadlySins

gilesltd.com/product/vivi...

“Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest”

Edited by Adrienne L. Childs & Amara Antilla

Publishing in April with #PhillipsMuseum

#artbooks #protest #protestart #VivianBrowne #AfricanAmericanArt #AmericanArt

gilesltd.com/product/vivi...

"Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest"
Publishing April with #phillipscollection
This long overdue volume re-establishes Vivian Browne as an important & dynamic American artist with an expressive hand & expansive world view.

#VivianBrowne #AmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArt
gilesltd.com/product/vivi...