Joan BrownThis Kind of Bird Flies Backward

Video of curator Jodi Throckmorton discussing Joan Brown on the occasion of the exhibition This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown at the San José Museum of Art, October 14, 2011–March 11, 2012. Video by San José Museum of Art.

The women’s movement paralleled Joan Brown’s career, yet she has been largely excluded from its history. The artist’s pioneering use of personal and domestic imagery in her work—of furniture, her studio interior, her mother—and autobiographical narrative anticipate the aesthetic terrain explored by women artists in the 1970s.1 In 1960 her work was included in the traveling exhibition Women in American Art and in an accompanying spread in Look magazine with other distinguished female artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe.2 But Brown initially rejected feminist labels for fear it would stifle her work, withdrawing from the art world’s critical gaze that threatened to check her intuition.3 Above all, she sought freedom of expression: “The more I am able to express the various dimensions of myself, the richer and freer the art will be.”4

  1. Jodi Throckmorton, introduction to This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2011), available at sjmusart.org/joan-brown/essay.html. ↩︎

  2. Jodi Throckmorton, “Early Success,” in This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2011), available at sjmusart.org/joan-brown/early-success-1.html. ↩︎

  3. Joan Brown, interview with Lynn Gumpert, in Early Work: Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis Jimenez, Gary Stephan, Lawrence Weiner (New York: The New Museum, 1982), 17. ↩︎

  4. Joan Brown, interview with Lynn Gumpert, in Early Work: Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis Jimenez, Gary Stephan, Lawrence Weiner (New York: The New Museum, 1982), 19. ↩︎