Vivian Browne: Africa Series 1971-1974

VIVIAN BROWNE AFRICA SERIES 1971 - 1974

VIVIAN BROWNE

AFRICA SERIES 1971-1974

Cover: detail of The Gathering, 1973

Portrait of Vivian Browne, c. 1972 Photo credit Jeanie Black

VIVIAN BROWNE: AFRICA SERIES: 1971-1974 DR. LESLIE KING-HAMMOND

“Hear with your eyes and see with your ears.”

Charlie Parker

“Tell stories filled with facts Make people Touch Taste and Know Make people FEEL, FEEL, Feel!

Octavia Butler

“Abstract work is very spiritual in nature… consciously or not. We are all natural storytellers… what is meaningful in the exchange of looking at the artist’s point of view, will go into their spirit and… begin to connect through their stories—which opens up more unconscious interaction surfacing to the conscious realm. Those continuums will always make the connection more complete—as it is reaching past what one sees.”

Kimberly Becoat

The artistic legacy of Vivian Browne, presented in this exhibition on the Africa Series: 1971-1974, is a timely opportunity to consider the omission of African American artists from the discourse on abstraction, as well as the position African Art occupies within the spectrum of American Modernist traditions. Browne was a woman, a Black person, an abstractionist artist, a feminist, an educator and a passionate activist for truth and justice—becoming a member of the feminist collective Heresies and editing its critical issue on Racism in 1982. Her artistic journey was arduous; she worked relentlessly throughout her life to infuse her paintings, drawings and prints with what she believed to be real humanistic experiences. Browne had little concern for the prevailing stylistic trends, modalities or political expectations of her time. She was an artist who sought to ‘hear with her eyes and see with her ears,’ ‘tell stories’ with factual truths, and free her un/conscious mind to create inspired connections ‘reaching past what one sees.’ Browne was a woman of her time and yet, in many ways—ahead of her time, with an inquisitive eye on the state of humanity and the looming crisis of environmental conditions on this planet.

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Vivian Browne was born (1929) in Laurel, Florida to Depression Culture parents, who became part of the Great Migration of African Americans (1925-1945) moving to northern cities in flight from racial violence and poor education. They were in search of safety, better employment and heightened opportunities for a higher quality of life and the ‘freedoms’ promised in America’s Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Browne was a two-month-old infant when the family settled in South Jamaica, Queens, New York. Recalling her family life in a interview with critic Henri Ghent she describes how: “…my father painted when I was a child and we all used to watch him.

He painted in oils… after work. He was very slow but he stuck to it. He also did some craft work, woodwork. He had a shop in the cellar… My mother is an excellent designer and seamstress… Mother made clothes for everything, suits, coats, dresses, everything… actually from both of them we got something. A kind of taste and selection they both have. It wasn’t a big thing in our house as children… when I started painting my mother was horrified, absolutely horrified… And she is the reason I went into teaching… We did not go to museums as children… but we had lots of music. We just had air, I suppose, to get along.” 1 During Browne’s formative years, numerous iconic jazz musicians, R&B artists, and stellar athletes such as Jackie Robinson purchased homes in the neighboring community of St. Albans/Addisleigh Park near Browne’s home in South Jamaica, Queens. This neighborhood and other adjoining communities in Queens became a vibrant center of innovative exchanges of musical genius for these avant-garde exemplars of the new modernist sound. Titans like Charlie Parker, Arthur Prysock, Brook Benton, Count Basie, Milt Hinton, Fats Waller, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, James Brown as well as members of the Modern Jazz Quartet became neighbors and homeowners there. Often they performed impromptu sets in local area bars and the popular Club Ruby, attracting other notables to play with them. Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong lived not far away in Flushing, Queens, New York.2 The Jazz scene was deeply woven into the infrastructure of these local communities where they were highly regarded, as they were in the New York club scene, nationally and abroad. It is not hard to imagine a young Vivian Browne in the proximity of these masterful improvisational sound4

Vivian Browne at the opening of her solo exhibition at Artist House, 1974

architects—to her just ‘normal’ neighbors in the community. In actuality, the entire Browne family were more than likely infused with the presence of Jazz, as well as other popular musical forms creating that constant flow of “lots of music” of that era.

The influences of Jazz’s improvisational structures—which prioritize the individual creativity of a solo artist—became a potent influence in an un/conscious catalytic dynamic that fueled the development of Browne’s voracious intellect and drove her need to visually express a unique personal perspective. Jazz innovators and the singularity of their compositional abstractions—an expressiveness that was in a constant state of re/creation—were important models and artistic signifiers that played a crucial role in the early career of Browne’s conscious and unconscious mind.

Browne’s formal early education was achieved in the New York City Public School system—in predominantly white schools.

She completed her higher education with a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Arts from Hunter College (CUNY) with additional studies at the New School of Social Research, the Art Students League and the Pratt Graphics Center. Her professional artistic career and political awareness began to evolve during the 1960’s with the voices of women in the feminist movement (19631981) forming a lifelong sisterhood of friendships with artists Emma Amos, Betty Blayton and Camille Billops—who also lived and had studios in SoHo’s growing community of artists in lower Manhattan. Intense tidlewaves of violence during the Civil Rights Movement (1954-68) were excerbated by the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1969, escalating the climate of racial crisis in America. Concurrent with the intensity of these socio-political issues, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s—godfathered by writer Amiri Baraka—emerged and was accentuated with the founding of the Black Panther Party (1967) and New York City’s Young Lords (1970). AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, 1969) emerged as an arts collective of gifted painters, printmakers and designers, and ignited spectrums of ‘kool-aid’ colors into their aesthetics of Black visual empowerment, punctuated with Black Power themes stressing pride and positivity.

Browne, in an interview with painter Emma Amos, recalls how, “During the Civil Rights Era, one had to paint black themes, black people, black ideas, I didn’t… I was painting my kind of protest, but it didn’t look like black art… Then I was painting these little old white men.” 3 Her early creations aligned with a political vision focused on Browne’s artistic needs rather than the figurations of representational conventions exposed by Black Nationalist expectations. Nor did her artistry necessarily conform to popular feminist ideas and attitudes often queried as ‘what is woman’s art?’ Her protests did manifest in the Little Men series (1968-1971) that grew to “become a comment on the human condition… they grew out of an entire upheaval in my own emotional reaction to the world around me… it is about people and how they are reacting to each other… how I see them. It is a very personal vision.” 4 These works attest to her determination to be in charge of her own artistic destiny. When questioned by the academic James V. Hatch in a 1972 interview on how she identified herself demonstratively, Vivian Browne emphatically determined that, “…what I’m saying is, if I’m a black artist—and I am a black artist—then that means that I can stand up against anybody else.” 5 Browne was an ardent activist throughout her life, becoming a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) in 1969—which, under the leadership of painter Benny Andrews, protested against the exclusion of African American artists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Harlem on my Mind the same year. In 1971, Browne became an early member of the Black women’s arts collective Where We At, organized by artists Faith Ringgold and Kay Brown to promote opportunities for Black women artists. As the feminist movement continued to evolve in the United States during the 1960’s and 1970’s, Browne’s activist engagement increased, joining the formidable feminist collective, Heresies, where she helped edit 5

the seminal issue Racism is the Issue (1982, Vol. 4 No. 3). Given the vast range of her intellect, expertise and travel experiences, Browne became an exceptionally gifted educator that included teaching in New York City prisons with Benny Andrews’ teaching program, an initiative associated with the BECC. From 1971 through 1992, she became a professor of fine art and art history at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, and taught graduate courses in the California college system towards the end of her life.

It might have appeared that Browne was working in an isolated vacuum, but she had become part of the growing historical quest by African American artists for answers to ill-resolved questions regarding their legacy and relationship to their African ancestry. Between 1853 and 1977, artists of African descent traveled to Africa, though not always for the purpose of finding their genealogical roots. Distinguished artists such as Augustus Washington, Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Henry Johnson, John Biggers, Robert Colescott, Jacob Lawrence and Howardena Pindell traveled to the African nations of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria. Each of these artists ventured forth on individual journeys. John T. Biggers had one of the most telling responses to that experience and described it as a “positive shock” so intense that he could not create any art while traveling throughout the continent.6 The phenomenality of this cataclysmic response reached epic proportions in 1977 when over 200 artists of African descent from the United States traveled to Lagos, Nigeria for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac ‘77).7 Each artist experienced a “positive shock’,’ which describes the overwhelming catharsis of the African American artist—being in Africa for the first time—in witnessing firsthand the arts and cultures, rituals and traditions, belief systems and historical legacies, as well as receiving sacred knowledge of complex principles and technological processes. A massive reconfiguration of their creative psyches and unseen perceptions of Africa was completely transformed by the magnitude of humanity, depth of history and legacy of ancestral spirituality, which was beyond anything that could have ever been imagined.

Each artist found that being immersed into African realities affirmed their defiant resistance to popularized stereotypical depictions of African and African American people as grotesque, unintelligent and inhuman beings, created by the dominant White class to justify systems of enslavement—past and present—and the relentless racist conditions in America that continue to escalate in the twenty-first century. Layered complexities of African histories, cultures, languages, music, standards of beauty and traditional practices on the African continent and its people were empowering catalysts that fostered and confirmed the critical need for new narratives and stylistic modalities that would not have been otherwise possible had the African American artist not traveled to Africa engaging and embracing the endlessness of its vast visual resources.

On her first trip to West Africa to study at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, Browne recounts her experience: “In 1971 I went to Africa, and that was a very joyous experience. The fact of discovery of a heritage, it was very, very important. I came back with all these ideas. While in Africa I didn’t do any drawings, or paintings there. I was busily absorbing everything. I went to Nigeria in order to look at the art in Nigeria—the sculpture that’s there [as well as in Ghana]… I began to paint immediately so I wouldn’t get away from the canvas. Somehow, I let it go, it just came… I let it come without any control or contrivance. The expression was an abstract idea—not an abstract of a particular thing, but an abstract of a particular feeling, of a particular surrounding and an experience. The colors were much more heightened, the use of pattern was there because that was pervading everything that I saw or reacted to in Africa.” 8 The birth of Browne’s Africa Series is a profound stream of revelatory imagery, inspired by vibrant memories, experiences and reclaimed knowledge of Africa’s landscapes, artistries, culture and the ever-presence of “lots of music” in the ‘‘air.” In paintings, 6

prints and drawings, she channeled these dynamic elements into moving, vibrant compositions filled with color, patterns and symbols. In the exhibition catalogue of Kenkeleba Gallery’s Jus’ Jass exhibition (1983), she deftly describes how the elements of her created process evolved: “In Africa I happened upon a concert of regional choirs from all over Ghana. The rhythms, the dissonance, the off-up beat, the cacophony of sound were awe inspiring. I was transfixed.

I recognized the music. I knew that this was where Jass [Jazz] originated. There were different colors representing the new, but also in some sense, the familiar sounds. In these paintings the sounds, colors, lines, reflect the related order and rhythms between Jass forms and the African sounds to which we respond so completely and directly.” 9 The Adobe Krow Archives, which house the archival material Browne amassed throughout her life, as well as the Hatch-Billops Archives, contain vital information through their wealth of interviews in which Browne addresses the transformative nature of her African experiences and the stylistic evolution of her imagery from figurative representations to abstraction. The clarity of her voice is deeply introspective and empowered as she explains to painter Emma Amos in an 1986 interview how:

Installation view of Browne’s 1974 solo exhibition at Ornette Coleman’s Artist House in Soho, New York City

“My work changed from figurative to abstract. It changed without my deliberation. It changed because what I wanted to say changed. I had to paint differently in order to say it. My work began to be abstract after I came from Africa. The experience in Africa was such an emotional uplift that abstraction seemed to be the only way—manner—in which to work… the manner in which I work, has to do with emotional landscapes and an environmental one. Sounds get involved with that too. When I began thinking about music, the sound of Africa was such that it turned me around. I did not ever have an experience before of hearing that kind of call and response that Amiri Baraka speaks of… the dissonance became something that just was just an extraordinary musical experience. I had to have all those things in the work.” 10 The exhibition of Vivian Browne’s African Series at RYAN LEE Gallery is centered at complex intersecting crossroads that demand more formalities to address ‘why’ African American artists are not included in the critical discourse, as well as the development and documentation on the histories of abstraction of American Modernist traditions. Why has the impact of Africa’s physical, intellectual, philosophical, musical, traditional, aesthetic and spiritual principles not been addressed or acknowledged within the historical and critical canons? What is the relationship between these dynamics and American artists inspired by the vastness of Africa’s cultural, artistic and environmental wealth? These origins and conundrums have not been unknown, but selective amnesia, benign neglect and overt biases have contributed to the negation of these dynamics within art historical canons that 7

failed to draw attention to these innovations as the styles and taste of Modernism became formalized.11 In 1931, artist and critic Amédée Ozenfant in his treatise on Foundations of Modern Art observed and characterized early modernist expressiveness from a cultural perspective, stating, “The Egyptians, the Negroes [both African peoples], when they carved a god, a mask, for a scared dance or sacrifice, did not copy any natural effigy: they constructed forms that affect us.” 12 Continuing this stream of thought, preeminent culture critic for the Village Voice newspaper, Greg Tate addresses an Africanist, Black-centered observation that asserts a positioning in the 2003 art review, “To bid a Poet Black and Abstract.” He states: “By which we mean a critical embrace for Black artists whose tribal markings and mysteries may be so abstracted and encoded as to be invisible to the naked eye… A Black art project whose raison d’être is to surrender the spectator to the presence of things unseen—ontological artifacts that prove to be as deeply felt as most fugitive, freed-up, expansive, energetic and complex Black musics.” 13 In the most recent, innovative and timely research on African and Diasporic Black Atlantic cultures, Africanist scholar Henry John Drewal's research is focused on the ‘Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond.’ Drewal’s work brings profound sensibilities, focus and connectivity to the artistry, intellectual, spiritual and physiological processes experienced by artists of African ancestry. He describes sensiotics as a type of semantics of linguistic “playful pokes” stating; “we do not ‘read’ a painting; we look at and see it using our sense of sight… quite different from reading a ‘text’… not only is our sense of sight engaged, but all of our senses and sense memories that we bring to the perception of that work, whether we are conscious of them or not—of hearing, touch, taste, smell… perhaps others as well, depending upon our cultural background and life experiences. We think with our multisensory body-minds.” 14 The expressiveness of Vivian Browne’s imagery—cohorts Emma Amos, Betty Blayton, Camille Billops—as well as Kay Brown, Faith Rinnggold, the AfriCobra collective, Where We At artists, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Jacob Lawrence, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Joe Overstreet, Al Loving, Jack Whitten— to mention but a few of the enormity of all modalities of iconic Black abstracted expressiveness, are long overdue for acknowledgment and incorporation into the annals and canons of a more ‘whole’ history of the legacy of American Modernism and beyond. Browne’s African Series is a celebratory and revelatory statement of tribute, that honor her efforts and generations of African American Modernist expressors, some who have yet to be revealed and positioned into the nuanced visual contours of American abstraction and its indebtedness to the classical art forms of Africa by African American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

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Vivian Browne in her studio, 1974 Photo by Jeanie Black

Endnotes *I would like to give special acknowledgement and gratitude of support for this essay to the assistance of Ethel Renia at RYAN LEE Gallery; Katherine Cowan, Research Archivist at the Decker Library, Maryland Institute of Art; Lowery Stokes Sims; and Henry John Drewal for their generous support of their wisdom and scholarship.

1. Vivian Browne Oral Interview Henri Ghent, July 1, 1968, Smithsonian, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 2. See musicofqueens.com for the wall murals that celebrate Jazz notables and photographs of their homes cited in this essay. More fascinating is to log on to this website and read through the comments of local residents who share special memories and nostalgia of the many celebrities who lived in these communities and their experiences with these dynamic musicians. It should also be noted that this writer lived in the same neighborhood as Vivian Browne and later moved to Hollis, Queens—next door to St. Albans—and also has great memories from the late 1950’s and 1960’s.

3. Interview with Emma Amos, Artist and Influence, 1986, Hatch-Billops Archives, Emory University.

4. Oral Interview with Oakley Holmes, Black Artist in America (film), 1975, Archives of RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

5. Oral Interview with James V. Hatch, 1972, Hatch-Billops Oral History of Black Culture series. Hatch-Billops Oral History at the City College of New York, New York, RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

6. Alvia Wardlaw. The Art of John Biggers - A View from the Upper Room, Harry N. Abrams, INC. in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1995, p.46-53.

7. Having previously visited Africa in 1971, Browne did not attend FESTAC. In 1977, she was invited to participate in the first delegation of American Crafters and Artists to the People’s Republic of China. She was the first African American woman to be invited by the government to visit China.

8. Oral Interview with Oakley Holmes, Black Artist in America (film), 1975, Archives of RYAN LEE, New York.

9. Cited in Jus’ Jass, exhibition catalogue, Kenkeleba Gallery, 1983, New York.

10. Interview with Emma Amos, Artist and Influence, 1986, Hatch-Billops Archives, Emory University.

11. In her 1991 review of Kenkeleba Gallery’s The Search for Freedom: African American Abstract Painting, 1945-1975, Roberta Smith notes: “Moving from the late 1940’s to the mid 70’s, through roughly three generations of painters, it gave a good indication of how much must be learned about black artists’ contribution to Abstract Expressionism and their participation in more recent brands of non-objective art like Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.”

12. Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art, Dover Publications, INC, 1952 (1931), p. 240.

13. Greg Tate, “To Bid a Poet Black and Abstract,” The Greg Tate Reader, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016, p. 210.

14. Henry John Drewal, “Sensiotics, Or The Study of The Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond”, Chapter 14, Manuscript Draft (forthcoming publication), Archives of Henry John Drewal, 2021.

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“In 1971, I went to Africa, and that was a very joyous experience. The fact of discovery of a heritage, it was very very important. I came back with all these ideas. While in Africa I did not do any sketches, I didn’t do any drawings, or painting there. I was busily absorbing everything. I went to Nigeria in order to look at the art in Nigeria—the sculpture that’s there. When I came back I began drawing again—which is always the way I start a new thing. We have to always go back to drawing. So I did that.

I began painting immediately so I wouldn’t get away from the canvas. Somehow I let it go, it just came, it just happened, whatever expressions were coming, whatever visual ideas came, I let come without any control or contrivance. The expression was an abstract idea— not an abstract of a particular thing, but an abstract of a particular feeling, of a particular surrounding and an experience. The colors were much more heightened; the use of pattern was there because that was pervading everything that I saw or reacted to in Africa. And I changed to acrylics because they were much faster.”

—Vivian Browne interviewed in Oakley Holmes's film, Black Artists in America, 1974

Left: detail of Diversities, 1973

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Umbrella Plant, 1971 Oil on canvas 48 3/4 x 40 3/4 inches (123.8 x 103.5 cm)

Exhibition History: 1972 1972 1973 1974-75 1975 1976 12

A New Vitality in Art: Black Women, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts 1 to One: Beginnings of Unity, Countee Cullen Library, New York African Memories, Adams Library Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island Rutgers University Studio Art Faculty - Camden-Newark, University Art Gallery, Vorhees Hall, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Vivian Browne, Artist House, New York 6 Black American Woman Artists, Black Student Union and The Art Guild, Bergen Community College, New Jersey

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The Chiefs Attendant, c. 1972 Acrylic on canvas 60 3/4 x 50 3/4 inches (154.3 x 128.9 cm)

Exhibition History: 1973 1981 1983 14

African Memories, Adams Library Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island Forever free : Art by African-American Women, 1862-1980, curated by David Driskell, University of Maryland Art Gallery Jus’Jass: Correlations of Painting and Afro-American Classical Music, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York

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Shango Kingdom, 1972 Acrylic on canvas 17 1/2 x 48 3/4 inches (44.5 x 123.8 cm) 16

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Assistant to the Chief, c. 1973 Acrylic on canvas 52 3/4 x 64 3/4 inches (134 x 164.5 cm)

Exhibition History: 1973 1974 1974-75 1983 18

African Memories, Adams Library Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island Vivian Browne, Artist House, New York Rutgers University Studio Art Faculty - Camden-Newark, University Art Gallery, Vorhees Hall, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Jus’Jass: Correlations of Painting and Afro-American Classical Music, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York

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Diversities, 1973 Acrylic on canvas 54 3/4 x 54 3/4 inches (139.1 x 139.1 cm)

Exhibition History: 1972 1973 1974-75 20

1 to One: Beginnings of Unity, Countee Cullen Library, New York African Memories, Adams Library Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island Rutgers University Studio Art Faculty - Camden-Newark, University Art Gallery, Vorhees Hall, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

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The Gathering, 1973 Acrylic on canvas 55 x 65 inches (139.7 x 165.1 cm)

Exhibition History: 1973 1975 22

African Memories, Adams Library Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island Vivian Browne, Artist House, New York

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Abstract #1 from African Series, 1974 Oil on canvas 21 x 22 1/2 inches (53.3 x 57.2 cm) 24

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Abstract Forest, 1974 Oil on canvas 22 1/2 x 20 3/4 inches (57.2 x 52.7 cm) 26

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“Now I’m concerning myself more with form and color, but it’s the form and color based on an African experience. This painting over here, which seems to be an abstraction that is not based on any reality, actually is a very definite reality. It is my—I’m very fond of flowers.

And it’s my plant here. I call it 'Umbrella Plant'—with the sense of an African patterning.

You know, when I went in the summer, pattern was something that was very, very—it was overwhelming, the pattern that was there. And I really couldn’t get away from that.

So when I came home, I just started doing patterns. So it’s my immediate experience, my immediate surroundings and environment, plus the experience of being a black person in Africa, and putting those together. One really wouldn’t work without the other, as far as I’m concerned. Because I’m not an African. And so I couldn’t go where they go with pattern in their painting. And at the same time as a black person here, I can, you know, relate to it more directly.”

—Vivian Browne in conversation with James V. Hatch at her West Broadway studio, 1972

Left: detail of Umbrella Plant, 1971

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The Bathers, 1971 Gouache, ink and pastel 19 1/2 x 28 inches (49.5 x 71.1 cm) 30

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Benin Beauty, 1971 Watercolor and ink 17 3/4 x 24 inches (45.1 x 61 cm) 32

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Tribes Woman, 1971 Watercolor and ink 19 3/4 x 14 inches (50.2 x 35.6 cm) 34

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Ibeji, 1973 Etching 22 7/8 x 18 7/8 inches (58.1 x 47.9 cm) Edition of 35

Exhibition History: 1973 2021

Blacks:USA:1973, curated by Benny Andrews, New York Cultural Center Friends and Agitators: Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Vivian Browne, and May Stevens, 1965-1993 RYAN LEE, New York

Other impressions of this print exist in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, MD; and the Schomburg's Art and Artifacts Division, NY. Printed at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

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Horseman I, 1974 Etching 22 x 15 inches (55.9 x 38.1 cm) Edition of 35 Exhibition History: 1972 1973 1975 1984 2017 2021

A New Vitality in Art: Black Women, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts Blacks:USA:1973, curated by Benny Andrews, New York Cultural Center Women I, Printmaking Workshop, New York Art in print: A Tribute to Bob Blackburn, Schomburg Center, New York We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85, Brooklyn Museum, New York Travelled to the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA Creating Community. Cinque Gallery Artists, The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, the Art Students League of New York

Other impressions of this print exist in the collections of Ireland’s National Cultural Institution for Modern and Contemporary Art, IE; the Library of Congress, DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Petrucci Family Foundation, NJ; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC. Printed at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

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THE AFRICA SERIES IN CONTEXT: A TIMELINE

The timeline included in this catalogue details Browne’s career in relation to her Africa Series and travels to Africa in 1971. For a more general overview, please consult the gallery’s previous publications, Vivian Browne: Little Men (2019) and Friends and Agitators: Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Vivian Browne, and May Stevens, 1965-1993 (2021).

Left: Vivian Browne at Artist House, 1974

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1929

Vivian E. Browne is born April 26 in Laurel, FL, and grows up in Jamaica, Long Island.

1964

Browne is awarded a fellowship at the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Southern California. This was her first time being able to paint full-time, and she considered this experience life changing.

Browne sketching at the Huntington Hartford Foundation, 1964

1966-1971

Becomes an art supervisor at New York’s Board of Education. A dedicated painter with extensive teaching experience, Browne initially accepted the job thinking it would only last six months. She stayed at this job for five years. Her experiences there helped inspire her militant Little Men series, which includes works on paper and paintings on canvas. This was her first major series of work and preceded her Africa Series. In 2019, RYAN LEE produced a catalogue on the Little Men series.

While “I was art supervising, I continued to paint these little men. Because the people I ran into were superintendents, and principals, and coordinators, and people of that ilk, who were busily trying to preserve some small, teenie weenie little place in their lives where they were important. And not putting in for that importance. They were just important people—they thought. And it was like little men playing games all the time. That’s not how I started painting those Little Men but that’s how it ended up.”

—Vivian Browne in interview with James V. Hatch in her studio on West Broadway, 1972

1967-1970

The Nigerian Civil War breaks out. Later, Browne reflected on the physical scars left by the war that she witnessed during her travels to Nigeria in a 1986 interview with Emma Amos : “While we were at Ibadan [in 1971], we went to various places and one of the places we went was Benin. That was rather startling, because it was soon after their civil war. When I went to Israel [in 1980], I saw the same kinds of things that I’d seen in Africa while driving from Ibadan to Benin. We saw overturned jeeps and tanks, things along the road that were left as memorials and monuments of the terrible war in eastern Nigeria.”

Biafran soldiers advance towards a Nigerian army position during the Nigerian Civil War in June 1968. Photo credit Ron Burton/Mirrorpix/Getty Images

1968

Dr. Martin Luther King is assassinated. In response, Browne participates in the exhibition In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Museum of Modern Art New York, which was organized seven months after Dr. King’s death. The exhibition comprised of 60 artworks donated by nearly 60 leading American artists, including Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Sam Gilliam, Jasper Johns, Elsworth Kelly, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Charles White.

All proceeds from the works sold went to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization founded by King.

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1968

Fuelled by the spirit of the civil rights and Black Power era, Browne along with Brooklyn Museum Community Gallery curator Henri Ghent, Faith Ringgold and “some people at the Studio Museum” protest the Whitney Museum’s The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America. This exhibition, which claimed to survey the American art scene throughout the 1930s, omitted the Harlem Renaissance completely, and did not include the work of a single Black artist. The initial group of protesters were joined by Benny Andrews and other important members of what would become the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), an action group of black artists and activists campaigning for greater visibility in the art world.

1968

Browne acquires her loft at 451 West Broadway with the help of her friend Norman Lewis. She becomes an early member of the Soho Artist Association, which was founded the same year, and was based in her building. She remained at this address until her death in 1993. She remained an active member of the Soho artist community throughout her career.

1969

Browne becomes a founding member of the BECC. “We met crises,” Browne explained in a 1972 interview with James V. Hatch. “That’s really what kind of organization it was. It wasn’t an aggressive organization in that sense. It was one that went to protest things that happened that one couldn’t deal with.”

The BECC would go on to protest a number of events in the New York City art scene that the group deemed intolerable.

Cliff Joseph and Vivian Browne featured in the New Art Examiner protesting a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition with the BECC, 1976

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1969

Browne and the artist Floyd Coleman (her future travel companion to Africa) exhibit together in a group exhibition entitled Afro-American Artists: Since 1950 at the College Lounge Student Center, Brooklyn College. The exhibition is sponsored by the Brooklyn League of Afro-American Collegians (BLAC) and organized by Henri Ghent, the co-founder and early leader of the BECC.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for Afro-American Artists: Since 1950

1971

In response to the Whitney Museum’s controversial exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America, Browne participates in a counter-exhibition at acts of art gallery entitled Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition, sponsored by the BECC. She exhibits two prints Amistad (1970) and Room Divider (1967).

Vivian Browne and Nigel Jackson protesting the Whitney Museum on January 31, 1971. Jackson was the director of acts of art gallery, which mounted the Rebuttal exhibition

1971

Browne is an early member of the Where We At artists’ collective, established by Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, and others to increase professional opportunities for Black women artists.

Courtesy of the Hatch-Billops archives

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1971

Browne makes her first trip to Africa. She accompanies painter Floyd Coleman on a grant-funded trip to West Africa (awarded by the gas company ESSO). They spend the majority of their trip in Nigeria. Browne studies and resides at the University of Ibadan for six weeks. Following these six weeks, they drive to Lagos and Ghana and spend two weeks there. While studying at Ibadan, Browne went to visit a variety of places on day trips, including Benin.

Browne dancing at a party in Ibadan, 1971

At this time, the University of Ibadan was not a large school, and did not have an established art department. It had an enrollment of approximately 4,000 students and had only become independent from the University of London in 1962. Browne and Coleman travelled to Nigeria just one year after the civil war came to an end.

1971

Browne attends the National Conference of Artists in Atlanta for the first time.

Founded in 1959, the National Conference of Artists is the oldest operating African American arts organization in the United States. Its New York chapter was formed two years later after Browne involved herself in the group.

In Atlanta, Browne and other attending artists debate what defines the terms “Black art” and the “Black aesthetic.” According to Browne, the consensus is divided between an “older crowd” (exemplified by the artist William Artis) advocating for an open-ended answer to this question; and a younger generation (led by the artist Dana Chandler) pushing for more of a unified and definitive statement.

Browne at Victoria-Tarkwa Bay Beach, Lagos, Nigeria, 1971

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1971

Browne becomes a professor of fine art and art history at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.

“I was there to teach Afro-American history in art. They had established this course for maybe a year before I got there. A year or two. And it was written up and done by a white man who felt very, very strong about it. And he started the course. It was in Newark and that’s a large black community, of course. He brought in a black poet who also worked with him on it. But it was the beginning of student uprisings, and they felt they needed a black person to teach the course fully. And so my good neighbor arranged to have me come in to do that, and I did it once, twice a week at Rutgers. This year, I’m there full-time and I’m teaching that along with other things,” Browne explained to James V. Hatch in a 1972 interview.

1972

Browne exhibits works in her Africa Series in a two-person exhibition, 1 to One: Beginnings of Unity, with BECC co-director Cliff Joseph. This show took place at Countee Cullen Library, on West 136th Street, New York. The theme of the exhibition was one of unity between black men and women artists.

“We were searching for a title describing getting together as Black males and females in this sexist society. Women are not given due recognition… we combined our talents… ‘one to one.” Cliff Joseph explained in a New York Amsterdam News article by Mel Tapley.

“We were aware that Black men and women artists have been having differences.”

Browne added. “The unity wasn’t there… Our show demonstrates that two people can come together.”

Browne at the opening of 1 to One: Beginnings of Unity, 1972

Installation view of Browne’s Africa Series paintings at 1 to One: Beginnings of Unity, 1972

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1972

Browne attends the National Conference of Artists in Chicago. This conference was co-chaired by Floyd Coleman and Margaret Burroughs. The conference was attended by prominent Black artists across the United States, including Selma Burke, Dana Chandler, William Artis, Camille Billops, Benny Andrews, and William Walker, among others.

1972

Browne exhibits a selection of Africa Series paintings in a four-person show at the Afro-American Studio.

1972

Browne exhibits a small selection of her Africa Series in A New Vitality in Art: Black Women at Mount Holyoke College. This exhibition is in conjunction with a symposium entitled Black Artists and the Black Art Show, in which Browne served as a guest speaker alongside Benny Andrews, Raymond Saunders and Richard Mayhew.

The exhibition itself included the work of only Black women artists, and featured Camille Billops, Lois Mailou Jones, Howardena Pindell, Valerie Maynard, and Ann Tanksley, among others.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for A New Vitality in Art: Black Women, 1972

Flyer of the 1972 National Conference of Artists in Chicago 53

1972

Browne gives an interview with her friend, the academic and activist James V. Hatch, as part of his Hatch Billops oral history project with his wife, Camille Billops.

During this interview, Browne discusses at length her experiences in Africa.

1972

The Rhode Island College holds Vivian Browne: African Memories, the first and only solo exhibition dedicated to Browne’s Africa Series. In fact, this show was Browne’s first-ever solo exhibition. Curated by Lawrence Sykes, the show featured fifteen paintings and six works on paper.

1973

Three Africa Series prints, Horseman (1972), Ibeji (1972), and Attendant (1973), are included in Benny Andrews’s show Blacks:USA:1973 at the New York Cultural Center. According to the exhibition catalogue, this show is organized and curated with the goal of presenting to the New York art community a “major show of black artists chosen entirely by blacks.”

Exhibition logo for Benny Andrews’s show Blacks:USA:1973

1974

Browne exhibited Bini Apron at the Afro American Pavillion at the 1974 World Fair in Spokane, WA. This pavillion was organized by the Pan African Foundation in partnership with the Harlem Cultural Council.

Browne in front of a Nigerian mural, 1971

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Portrait of Vivian Browne, c. 1972 Photo credit Jeanie Black

Poster for Browne’s solo exhibition at Rhode Island College African Memories, 1972

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1974

Browne is included in the starting roster of Just Above Midtown (JAM), an art gallery led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color. Two of Browne’s works were selected to be featured in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Synthesis, alongside fellow artists Camille Billops, David Hammons, Norman Lewis, and Elizabeth Catlett, among others. The paintings included in the inaugural show were transitionary works between Browne’s Little Men and Africa Series.

1974

A cross selection of Browne’s works are exhibited at her first major solo exhibition in New York City at Ornette Coleman’s famed Artist House in Soho. The bulk of the paintings shown were from her Little Men and Africa Series.

1975

The filmmaker and producer Oakley Holmes produces Black Artists in America, a four-part film that features Vivian Browne twice. In the film’s profile of her, Browne discusses her African experiences and work at length.

1975

Browne exhibits paintings in her Africa Series at the Rutgers University Studio Art Faculty Camden-Newark exhibition. This exhibition takes place at the University Art Gallery, Vorhees Hall, Rutgers University.

Browne with the rest of the Newark Studio Faculty at Rutgers University Front row: Hildreth York, Elohim Raman, Vivian Browne Second row: Andrew Gardner, Al Hansen, Ernest Gusella, George Weber, Jr. Missing: Camille Billops and Domenick Capobianco

Browne and Camille Billops at the inaugural opening of JAM, 1974

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1975

A longtime member of Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop, Browne exhibits some Africa Series prints in Women I, an exhibition sponsored by the Workshop.

Blackburn’s workshop was an important gathering point for Black artists in New York; his influence was far-reaching.

1976

The artist Faith Ringgold, a longtime friend and peer of Browne’s, goes to Nigeria and Ghana for the first time to visit the people and art. This trip had a similarly large impact on Ringgold’s art, who incorporated masks in her artistic practice.

Lula Mae Blocton, Faith Ringgold, Vivian Browne, and Lillian Bartok at the opening and panel of Third World Women Artists, at SOHO20, 1978 Photo by Camille Billops

1976

Browne exhibits five Africa Series paintings at 6 Black American Woman Artists, an exhibition held by the Black Student Union and The Art Guild at the Bergen Community College in New Jersey. Browne showed alongside Camille Billops and Ann Tanksley, and others.

Cover of exhibition flyer for 6 Black American Woman Artists, 1976

1977

FESTAC 77 (also known as the Second World Black Festival of Arts and Culture) takes place in Lagos, Nigeria. This month-long event celebrated African culture and showcased to the world African music, fine art, literature, drama, dance and religion. About 16,000 participants, representing 56 African nations and countries of the African Diaspora, performed at the event. Stevie Wonder and Miriam “Mama Africa” Makeba performed at the festival, among other international artists. Faith Ringgold and other black New York artists also attend this festival. In 1977, Browne was invited to participate in the first delegation of American crafters and artists to visit the People’s Republic of China. Browne was the first African American woman invited by the government to visit China. This led to her subsequent China Series.

The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77). Photo by Marilyn Nance

1980

Browne travels to Egypt and Israel. This trip to Egypt was Browne’s second and last trip to the African continent.

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1981

Works in the Africa Series are exhibited in the large exhibition, Forever Free: Art by African-American Women, 1862-1980, curated by Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps and David Driskell. The exhibition, which originated at the Illinois State University, travelled to the Joslyn Art Museum, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Gibbes Art Gallery, the University of Maryland Art Gallery, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Browne exhibited alongside Camille Billops, Betty Blayton, Elizabeth Catlett, Margo Humphrey, Lois Mailou Jones, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Augusta Savage, and more.

Opening reception of Forever Free, with Vivian Browne and Camille Billops, among others

1982

Browne was an important member of the influential feminist collective Heresies, and contributed to its eponymous publication.

In 1982, she serves on the editorial board for its historic volume Racism is the Issue, which is an important step towards intersectional feminist discourse in the wider feminist art scene. In 2021, RYAN LEE examined her feminist leadership and impact in its 2021 exhibition and catalogue Friends and Agitators: Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Vivian Browne and May Stevens, 1965-1993.

Cover of the Heresies’s edition of Racism is the Issue

1983

Alongside fellow artists Emma Amos and Camille Billops (among others), Browne exhibits two Africa Series paintings at Jus’Jass: Correlations of Painting and AfroAmerican Classical Music at Kenkeleba Gallery, New York. In the exhibition catalogue she is quoted: “In Africa I happened upon a concert of regional choirs from all over Ghana.

The rhythms, the dissonance, the off-up beat, the cacophony of sound were aweinspiring. I was transfixed. I recognized the music. I knew that this was where Jass originated. There were different colors representing the new, but also in some sense, the familiar sounds. In these paintings the sounds, colors, lines, reflect the related order and rhythms between Jass forms and the African sounds to which we respond so completely and directly.”

1983

Browne’s works are showcased at a solo exhibition Paintings and Pastels, at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. Browne exhibited twenty-five works, which were “focused on humanistic rhythms based on African motifs.”

She wrote: “Using all the tools of a painter’s expression at my command, I attempt to honestly express the truth. The viewer, then, seeing my work, will not only look at the execution, but will also use his mind to evaluate certain flagrant questions that hang over our society.”

Cover of exhibition catalogue for Vivian Browne: Paintings and Pastels at Franklin & Marshall College

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1985

Alongside her many peers and colleagues, Browne is featured in in the seminal 1985 exhibition, Tradition and Conflict, Images of a Turbulent Decade 1963-1973 curated

by Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This landmark exhibition featured work by over fifty artists whose works were profoundly affected by the ideals and urgencies of the civil rights era. Browne exhibited works of her Little Men series.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for Tradition and Conflict

1986

Browne gives an interview to fellow artist Emma Amos, as part of the Artist and Influence artist interview series, sponsored and organized by James V. Hatch and Camille Billops. During this interview, she says the following of her Africa Series: “My work began to be abstract after I came from Africa. The experience in Africa was such an emotional uplift that abstraction seemed to be the only way, manner, in which to work. Also, the manner in which I work, has to do with an emotional landscape and an environmental one. Sound gets involved with that too. When I began thinking about music, the sound in Africa was such, that it turned me around. I did not ever have an experience before of hearing that kind of call and response that Amiri Baraka speaks of. I had never had that experience; the dissonance became something that was just an extraordinary, musical experience.

I had to have all those things in the work.”

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1991

Browne exhibits a selection of her Africa paintings in The Search for Freedom: African American Abstract Painting, 1945-1975, at Kenkeleba Gallery. This exhibition served as an important interrogation of art historical narratives surrounding Abstract Expressionism, which had long excluded Black artists. This exhibition also included Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Betty Blayton-Taylor, Ed Clark, Beauford Delaney, Sam Gilliam, Norman Lewis, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, and Hale Woodruff.

Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote, “This exhibition opened a window on history and provided a basis for surveys and retrospectives to come. Moving from the late 1940’s to the mid 70’s, through roughly three generations of painters, it gave a good indication of how much must be learned about black artists’ contribution to Abstract Expressionism and their participation in more recent brands of nonobjective art like Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. But it did so with extraordinary diversity, so that this contribution is never molded into a monolithic chunk, but instead remains the effort of distinct individuals. Its diversity should encourage an equal diversity of opinion and critical response.”

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for The Search for Freedom, 1991

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1993

Browne passes away on July 23. A selection of her Africa Series paintings are exhibited in memorial shows organized by Adobe Krow Archives in California.

Browne had become bi-coastal in the last few years of her life, maintaining a studio in Bakersfield, California and Soho, New York.

2022

RYAN LEE exhibits Browne’s Africa Series, in the first twenty-first century presentation of this body of work.

Installation view at RYAN LEE Gallery, 2022 66

Browne standing in front of her painting For You at the inaugural opening of JAM, 1974 67

Published on the occasion of the exhibition VIVIAN BROWNE: AFRICA SERIES, 1971-1974 May 6 - July 11, 2022 RYAN LEE Gallery 515 West 26th Street New York NY 10011 212 397 0742 www.ryanleegallery.com Essay by Dr. Leslie King-Hammond Catalogue management & timeline text by Ethel Renia Photography by Adam Reich Layout design by Mikhail Mishin Archival material courtesy of Adobe Krow Archives and the HatchBillops Archives.

Publication copyright © 2022 RYAN LEE Gallery All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022905842 ISBN: 978-0-578-36560-2