Artist and activist Vivian Browne’s name might not ring a bell with a lot of people, but she was and still is important to the Black arts movement.
Beginning in the 1960s and ending in her death, in 1993, Browne cultivated more than 100 works, including abstract paintings. She traveled to China, Africa and California, and those places are reflected in her work. She was a founder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and of the women’s art cooperative SOHO20. She also joined Where We At, a Black women’s art community, in NYC. Though she’s not an undiscovered artist, over the years her work had fallen off the radar. Thankfully, the Contemporary Arts Center and D.C-based The Phillips Collection have introduced her work to a new generation through the exhibition, Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest.
Co-curator Amara Antilla, who until 2023 was CAC’s senior curator at large but is now based in D.C, had the initial idea. “Amara’s idea was probably to take a look at this important artist, look at what she did and investigate what the issues were,” Adrienne L. Childs, co-curator of the exhibit and senior consulting curator of The Phillips Collection, told CityBeat. “Amara and the museum felt it was a great idea to do an exhibition that’s outside of the commercial realm to put her back on the map again.”
Childs and Antilla sifted through Browne’s California-based archives, which her family kept.
“Both of us would go through and talk about what we saw, what we liked, what we didn’t, what themes are coming out and it was a very collegial kind of thing back and forth,” Childs said.
As a historian, Childs was interested in looking at Browne’s past in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“What we have come to think of as that era is mainly stories about Black life, Black figures about a sort of resistance and civil rights and all of those things that were very important,” Childs said. “But we kind of left out those people who were working in abstraction, or those people who were not interested in necessarily telling those stories. They wanted to tell something very personal.”
As Childs put it, Browne “had the freedom to move beyond identity politics,” and was a great painter.
“She had a beautiful sense of color and a wonderful way of communicating,” she said. “It’s a really tragic time to think of a California landscape, but she was documenting it there. She was looking at how the power lines and technology were encroaching on nature and those tensions so that Black artists can be part of these discussions and are not framed by that one aspect of their identity — that’s what I want people to see, and to just introduce them to a new artist. I think there’s always room for that.”
Browne’s 1960s Little Men series focuses on grotesque white men and the patriarchy; Childs referred to the works as “gusty at the time.” Most of her works are devoid of Black figures. Browne once said, “Black art is political. If it’s not political, it’s not Black art,” which raises the question: What is Black art?
“Being a Black artist who is an abstract artist is a political statement because it’s carving out a space that works against a lot of different issues going on — that she can have a career and represent themes and ideas that are sort of outside of the box,” Childs said. “But at the time, there was pressure from your own people, your own groups, to have something to say about the plight of Black people in America. In some ways, people thought you were wasting your voice if you didn’t talk about those issues.”
Today, more women of color are represented in museums and galleries across the country. In 2017, Brooklyn Museum featured Browne and many other WOC artists in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 — the first of its kind. Now, with the rollback of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion programs), the art world needs to make it a priority to keep including artists like Browne in their permanent and temporary catalogues.
“Certainly, the doors have been opened, and I sometimes get concerned whether or not it’s a bubble and whether the bubble will burst,” Childs said. “I do wonder whether or not things will change as people and institutions start questioning whether or not diversity is an important part of moving forward, not just arts institutions. Many of these artists were ignored simply because they were Black, and now we can’t just put them forward simply because they’re Black. There’s got to be more to it than that. But I think that building on these artists’ careers and lives and works will make the contemporary art world more stable to have a good record of these artists.”
Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest is on display at the Contemporary Arts Center through May 25. More info: contemporaryartscenter.org.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Feb. 5 print edition.
This article appears in Feb 5-18, 2025.