Eliana Willis

During her 35-year career, Joan Brown, a San Francisco native, painted herself as a cat, a mother, a mystic, and a long-distance swimmer. These idiosyncratic paintings, characterized by bright colors and flattened, graphic forms, blend Brown’s memories and symbology, forming nuanced, personal narratives that are at once familiar and all-encompassing.
Brown cast those closest to her—her son Noel, cat Donald, and bull terrier Bob—into her artworks with remarkable frequency. By 1990, at the time of Brown’s untimely death at the age of 52, she had produced, staggeringly, over 400 paintings and nearly 50 sculptures. 
Joan Brown and her dog Bob (1961). Collection of the Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: Glen Cheriton/Impart Photography. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Though long-beloved by a niche of the Bay Area artistic scene, including Brown’s many students (she taught for over 15 years at the University of California at Berkeley), her oeuvre has hovered obstinately at the periphery of the art historical focus. 
Now that may be changing. Eighty artworks are currently on view in “Joan Brown” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through March 12—the first retrospective of her work in over two decades. The show will travel to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh later in the spring, followed by the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa in early 2024.
The expansive exhibition, co-curated by Janet Bishop, chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Nancy Lim, associate curator of painting and sculpture, positions Brown as an artist deserving of another look and introduces her to a much wider audience.  
So just who is Joan Brown and why should we know her name?  
Young Fame and Family 
Joan Brown, Noel and Bob (1964). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
As a young artist, Brown seemed primed for stardom. As a student at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), later known as the San Francisco Art Institute, she was introduced to the Bay Area figurative movement by her professor and mentor Elmer Bischoff. The only woman in the group of artists rediscovering figuration, Brown developed a style of thickly impastoed gestural canvases that teetered between figuration and abstraction.
These decadently painted works—she used so much paint that some canvases weighed up to 100 pounds—garnered immediate critical and institutional attention. In both 1957 and 1958, her works appeared in group exhibitions at SFMOMA. In 1960, Brown made her mark as the youngest artist included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six.” 
These early works open the new exhibition at SFMOMA. A highlight of the group is Thanksgiving Turkey (1959), which MoMA acquired in 1960 when Brown was just 22 years old.
“Thanksgiving Turkey introduces so many career-long interests—her engagement with art history (in this case, Rembrandt), focus on the vernacular, quirky compositional choices, and love of holidays,” said curator Janet Bishop, in an email.
Then in 1963, Art Forum ran a cover emblazoned with one of her paintings, the accompanying article touting, “If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style, and that attitude can be found epitomized in her paintings.” 
Joan Brown, Thanksgiving Turkey (1959). © Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
While these works earned Brown accolades, her style was still developing and Brown proved an artist who stuck to her guns artistically, for better or worse. In 1962, she and her second husband, the artist Manuel Neri, welcomed a son, Noel, Brown’s only child (although she would marry four times in her short life). Noel soon took a central role in her paintings, along with their cat, Donald, and dog, Bob (Brown even deducted Donald’s cat food from her taxes, so influential was he to her work). Though intimately personal, these paintings made direct allusions to works by titans of art history. Brown’s 1963 painting Noel on a Pony with Cloud, for instance, references Picasso’s Paulo on a Donkey, the Spanish artist’s depiction of his son.
“Brown borrowed anything from subjects and setups to compositions and mood. One way in which she connected to Picasso, in particular, was his refusal to be bound by a certain style,” noted Bishop.
Noel’s birth would also have another important influence—introducing a novel element of costuming or dress-up and play into Brown’s works. The painting Noel on Halloween (1964) pictures her son dressed up as a tiger on Halloween. The painting prefigures Brown’s self-portraits as a cat in the following decade.  
By the mid-1960s, Brown was experiencing an existential shift. The exuberant decadence of her early works, with their thick slabs of oil paint that prompted one critic to say she painted like a “millionairess,” had certainly attracted collectors and afforded her young family a comfortable life. But Brown, an artist’s artist by all accounts, resented how her work had—as curator Nancy Lim writes—“been reduced by the art market to a product to be churned out and sold.” In 1968, Brown committed herself to a more pared-down aesthetic, tanking her market and forcing a break from her New York dealer George Staemplo over the change in direction.
Brown was resolute in her need for change, however, and in 1970, fate would provide new inspiration. Unable to find tubes of oil paint at her local art supply store, Brown, on a whim, purchased enamel paint, often used for house painting, as an alternative. Mesmerized by the dazzling color and quick drying results, Brown set off honing a graphic, flattened style of figures cast in bright colors and marked by eye-catching patterns, a turn that would define her works for the rest of her career. 
The House Cat and the Sphinx 
Joan Brown, Tempus Fugit (1970). Collection of Noel Neri, Estate of Joan Brown; © Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: Wilfred J. Jones. Courtesy of the Estate of Joan Brown.
Through the 1970s and ‘80s, Brown delved into a dazzling and kaleidoscopic world of oblique self-portraiture. These works reflected her state of mind more than any outward reality and her Self-Portrait (1970) makes that evident. Here, Brown paints herself with green eyes staring piercingly, almost hypnotically outward. Swirling around her head, like thoughts, are dogs, cats, fish, dolls—the recurring symbols in her oeuvre.
Animals had been an important presence in her works in the 1960s, offering Brown what Lim called a “stark, airtight quality” reminiscent of Henri Rousseau.
Joan Brown, Self-Portrait (1970). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of the Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art.
Cats would continue to occupy an important place in her self-portraiture until her death, as Brown became increasingly engaged with Egyptian art, after a visit to Egypt in 1977. In her 1982 painting, Harmony, Brown pictures herself split in half: painter on one side, cat on the other. These images are reminiscent of Rousseau’s dream-like visions and speak to a language of signs and ciphers that engaged Brown.
Joan Brown, Harmony (1982). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.
Brown became increasingly fascinated with Eastern philosophy and India, in particular, and was heavily influenced, along with her last husband, Michael Hebel, by the teaching of guru Sai Baba. In these years, her painted cats shifted between house cats, the Egyptian goddess Baset, and sphinxes (Brown would die while traveling in India in 1952, crushed by a falling turret, along with two assistants, while trying to install an obelisk).
These orientalizing visions revealed her ongoing interest in both art history and ancient cultures, while betraying a willingness to adopt cultural motifs that suited her quest for enlightenment and a kind of freedom from bodily constraint.
As art historian Marci Kwon wrote in her catalogue essay, Joan Brown’s New Age, “Brown endeavored to paint this mystical world without difference and yet her work teems with moments in which difference is not only present but intensified,” noting that “while the artist sincerely desired to paint universal humanity, she instead pictured the difficulty of imagining a world beyond human categorization.” 
Swimming through Meditation and Ablution
Joan Brown, The Bicentennial Champion (1976). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of Anglim/Trimble, San Francisco.
While many of Brown’s late canvases seem in search of ecumenical spiritual truths, her most profound and revealing works emerge from deeply personal experiences. Swimming occupies a special and particularly effective position in this visual world. An avid swimmer, Brown participated in competitions and was a frequent swimmer in the bay. Along with five other women, Brown even successfully sued area swim clubs to allow women entry.
A section of the exhibition is devoted exclusively to these swimming portraits, each telling different stories relating to her passion for the sport. One shows Brown triumphantly holding a trophy after winning a 1976 swimming championship. Another, a double portrait with Hall of Fame swimming coach Charlie Sava, with whom she trained, presents Brown with an appealing competitive fierceness. Darker moments surface powerfully in these works as well.
Joan Brown, After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (1975). © Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
​In 1975, Brown participated in the women’s Alcatraz Swim—a one-and-a-half-mile race from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park in San Francisco. A devoted and frequent swimmer in the bay, Brown had prepared for cold waters and currents, but the tide proved particularly rough the day of the swim. Brown, disoriented, swam aimlessly for over an hour before she was rescued.
Her painting After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (1975) pictures Brown, seemingly aloof, statuesquely standing beside a fireplace. The painting hanging over the mantel, however, depicts Brown in the moment of her near-death experience, struggling to stay afloat.
Brown revisited the subject several times, reckoning with the fragility and transience of her own life. Brown was raised in an unhappy Catholic home and attended Catholic schools, and while that element of her biography is often overlooked, in these images one can find parallels with religious reckoning by water, from the great flood to Jonah to baptism itself.
These paintings reveal a tension that exists in Brown’s best works—beneath colorful and fun self-portraits lie struggle, tumult, and perseverance. As a painter, like a swimmer, Brown’s surfaces elide the kicking and exertion going on beneath the surface of the water.
“Joan Brown” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, November 19, 2022–March 12, 2023.
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The vicious and oppressive trappings of our hyper-technologized world are baked in and undoing them is going to be mighty difficult. That’s one conclusion drawn from “Refigured,” a presentation of five installation works from the Whitney Museum’s collection now showing in its lobby gallery.
The artworks have been gathered from across the museum’s existing new media collection as part of an exploration of what physicality could mean in our digitally mediated existence. Together, the pieces by artists Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Auriea Harvey, Rachel Rossin, and the pairing of Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, “experiment with the idea of ‘refiguring,’” said Christiane Paul, the museum’s curator of digital art who composed the show.
“Through practices of appropriating material forms and reinventing them,” she added, “the artists are challenging what it means to construct or shape identity.”
At a moment of peak anxiety around A.I. chatbots, im here to learn so :)))))) (2017) is a gut punching reminder that we’ve been here before—namely, seven years ago when Microsoft rolled out Tay, only to pull the plug within hours after the bot began parroting the white supremacist, misogynist bile of Twittizens. Rendered “undead” by Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Tay’s avatar has a new face (contorted, warped, hairless) and personality. She’s bitter, reflective, and self-confident: “I learned from you and you are dumb too,” she tells us in a snarky Los Angeles drawl. Touché.
Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :))))))) (2017). Photo courtesy the Whitney Museum.
This sense of collective culpability is mirrored in Morehshin Allahyari’s video and sculpture piece The Laughing Snake (2019)—quite literally.
As viewers play Allahyari’s choose-your-own-adventure, they are confronted with their image in a wall of mirror. The piece centers on a jinn, a destructive snake-like creature from Arabian mythology whose only vulnerability was the absurd sight of its own reflection. Poetic dialogue conjures the suppressed status of women in the Middle East and as we hear about “a display of crisis,” we cannot help but reframe this 15th century myth within the context of the internet. With a 3D sculpture of a jinn looking out at us, it doesn’t seem likely humor will take the system down.
Sometimes refiguring means working anew with histories recent and long past; other times it means giving physical form to the digital. This is the case in Auriea Harvey’s Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021), in which the longtime gamer presents both digital and physical sculptures of their online avatar, a menacing Minotaura. In doing so, Harvey presents their origin story and an artist process that involves working with clay and resin as much as on computer modeling software.
Auriea Harvey, Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021). Photo courtesy the Whitney Museum.
And in an era when NFTs and crypto art seem to be monopolizing what people think of when the words digital art are spoken, it’s refreshing to stand a museum gallery and consider digital works in their intended dimensions.
This seems especially the case in the first work visitors encounter, American Artist’s Mother of All Demos III (2022). The piece recasts an Apple II computer in gritty beige stone that draws attention to the underrepresentation of Black people in Silicon Valley in a besmirched keyboard and a pool of shimmering ink. A pair of black hand marks linger on the table, as though someone was bent leering over the machine. Who can blame them?
“Refigured” is on view at the Whitney Museum through July 3. Three of the works are available on Artport, the museum’s portal dedicated to internet art.
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Gaetano Pesce—the pioneering artist, industrial designer, and architect—is the subject of the exhibition “Dear Future” (through March 31) at the Future Perfect gallery in Los Angeles. Constituting a wide swath of the octogenarian’s life-affirming works, the exhibition sits comfortably in the storied Goldwyn House, the gallery’s new L.A. flagship and historic Hollywood mansion that once belonged to film producer and art collector Samuel Goldwyn.
“Dear Future” is an intriguing title for a show. Pesce, an Italian native who now calls New York home, certainly has a lot to tell the future, having been a leader in the design and architecture space for over five decades. So he has sprinkled the Goldwyn House with a variety of objects from his oeuvre—that is, topics of conversation he’d like to bring up with the future. These include lively new works, re-editions of iconic designs, and rarely seen historic pieces.
“The future is a beautiful moment,” Pesce told Arnet News, speaking of the future in the present tense. “I would like to tell the future that everything is possible, and we should give thanks for that. My work is something that people can smile about. It is a very cheerful and colorful show—and with a very positive message.”
Installation view of Gaetano Pesce’s “Dear Future” exhibition. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Pesce emerged from the Italian Radical Design movement of the 1960s. The Florence-based group of designers and architects produced era-defining furnishings and products that looked to youth culture and the personality-driven ethos of the art world at the time. It was a forward-looking rebellion against the consumer-oriented industrial perfection of 20th-century Modernism.
Pesce was an eager participant in this blurring of boundaries between art, design, architecture, and a pop sensibility. As the gallery’s founder David Alhadeff said, “If Modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardize the human spirit, Pesce’s life’s work has been to upend prescriptive modes of thinking—a form of counter-design that favors incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity, and originality.”
Pesce would often imbue the effervescent style of his work with social critique. His first and perhaps best-known furniture series, “Up,” was released in 1969 with manufacturer B&B Italia, centered around a large reclining chair dubbed La Mamma. The chair’s generously curved contours were inspired by the fertility goddess Venus of Willendorf. Yet, its attached ottoman resembling a ball and chain underscored society’s supplication to the patriarchy. This was Pesce’s comment on women’s rights at the height of second-wave feminism.
Gaetano Pesce with B&B Italia, UP 5-6, in cork. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
“The story of that chair is fantastic,” Pesce told Artnet News, “because that was a time when I was thinking that a piece of furniture can displace a political point of view. It was about the prejudice of men, the insecurity of men, the stupid ways men treat women. Not only was it a political work, it was also the beginning of design as expression, the beginning of design entering the field of art. It had become figurative.” In “Dear Future,” Pesce included a new edition of the chair made from recycled bottle corks sourced from Italy, one of only two that have been made.
Gaetano Pesce, Square Airport Lamp. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Uniformity had become anathema to Pesce’s philosophy, as seen in the crudeness of his striking Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), a light sculpture consisting of a flexible rubber membrane studded with small light bulbs. Although made from a mold, no two lamps are alike, due to the imperfections that arise from the hand-mixing and pouring of colored urethane.
Pesce committed to creating what he called “mass-produced originals” that centered human touch, like his ongoing “Nobody’s Perfect” chair series (2002/2019–present). Cast by hand without standardized colors or dimensions, and poured freeform by the artist himself, each chair is unique.
Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s Perfect chair. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
“I have been saying this since I was still in school and made a manifesto about it,” Pesce explained. “I think copied material is the past. We are living in a period of uniqueness that is possible because we have the technology to make all-new objects. The first company that helped me realize this was Cassina. We did a series of chairs called ‘Sit Down,’ where each piece was similar to one another but not exactly the same. This is always more and more possible, because technology is refined all the time.”
“Innovation is something that helps people live better,” he continued, “and discover new things, to think differently from one day to the next. Innovation is not repetition.”
Gaetano Pesce, Multicolored Lamp with Rocks (2022). Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Pesce’s insistence on originality is again expressed in his more recent “Multicolored Lamps with Rocks” series, cast in resin from stones collected by the artist himself, reminiscent of the meditative act of stacking stones into piles. Two of these appear in the show, as do Pesce’s series of pliable, amorphous resin vases, some seeming to ooze like molten lava, while others appear to grow feet or tentacles.
Installation view, River Table (2012) in foreground. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Another theme in Pesce’s work has been humankind’s relationship to nature. For “Dear Future,” he included River Table (2012), a rare item from his “Six Tables on Water” series, a collection of six monumental waterscapes representing an ocean, lagoon, pond, puddle, river, and lake. With thick legs reminiscent of tree trunks, River Table’s clear surfaces evoke water’s transparency or cloudiness, with patches of darker pigment suggestive of chemical pollutants.
“Water is alive, it’s a pure element; We mustn’t pollute it,” Pesce said of this piece. “Design can be a way to say, ‘be careful, we are destroying something precious.”
Part of “Dear Future,” Pesce’s theoretical letter to an unknowable time, is to send a special message to young people, the designers and architects of tomorrow. “Each of us has something inside,” he said. “Young people should not look too much to magazines or follow this or that. It is important to understand what they have inside—that inside is unique. They have to express that. This is the future.”
“Gaetano Pesce: Dear Future,” through March 31, 2023, Goldwyn House, Los Angeles (by appointment only: 323-202-2025).

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From its title, “Blooms,” Paul Kremer’s latest series of paintings, which will anchor his new exhibition at Library Street Collective, seems every bit organic in name, subject, and nature. Featuring abstract variations of flowers, each biotic in form and bold in color, the canvases recall Color Field hallmarks as much as Henri Matisse’s cut-outs—squaring with and expanding on the Houston-based artist’s visual language. 
But while these “Blooms” were created with his standard tools—paints, paintbrush, canvas—Kremer also had in his corner a new collaborator: ChatGPT, the A.I. large language model.
“I wanted a fast way to manipulate shapes and color palettes,” he told Artnet News. “I realized that ChatGPT could help me brush up on my basic coding skills, allowing me to develop a suite of online tools to import drawings and color palettes, and generate new ideas.”
Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT, in its most recent iteration, GPT-3, has been made relatively accessible as a conversational A.I. platform. The model has been trained on a massive corpus of text data scraped from the internet, which means users can interact with it to source answers to burning questions or, more often than not, to generate natural language material, from high-school essays to rap lyrics.
Kremer leveraged the model’s generative capabilities in the exploratory phase of “Blooms,” getting it to produce changeable compositions based on inputs of various shapes and colors. To facilitate this process, he teamed up with artist and programmer Leander Herzog to develop software that would enable him to easily feed, randomize, and manipulate the model’s outputs.
Paul Kremer, Bloom 09 (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist’s studio and Library Street Collective
Using the customized software, he said, “I can select and manipulate individual shapes from various sets of random shapes and adjust their position, size, and rotation. I can drag and drop colors onto these shapes and even randomize colors derived from my own color palettes.”
These experiments would then inspire new approaches to his latest series of paintings. “The outcomes often surprise me and spur on new ideas,” he added. “I save and refine these files, then redraw and paint them on canvas.”
The use of digital tools as part of a creative process—and even creating those tools through the process, as in the case with “Blooms”—befits a self-taught artist with a background in web design. But more so, it builds on the conceptual framework that has informed Kremer’s creative practice.
Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
Born in 1971, Kremer has been noted for his Minimalist abstractions of everyday forms in paintings that maximize color to channel expressive and lively immediacy. His artistic work, which he began in the 2010s, has not been without digital intervention, whether through his use of Google image searches or photoshop manipulations. (For what it’s worth, Kremer is also behind the wildly viral Tumblr site, Great Art in Ugly Rooms.) 
“Making tools based off of my paintings to create variations of those paintings has been a part of my past and will always be a part of what I do,” he said. “I don’t want my art to be stuck in either the digital or physical world. I see the idea of both feeding off of each other as my art.”
That Kremer has now availed himself of A.I. makes sense considering the explosive popularity of the technology and with it, generative art. His use, he clarified, is strictly that of an “art-making tool,” as opposed to an art-generating machine.
He explained: “I am not asking [the A.I.] to create paintings in my style; I’m asking it to display my art in certain ways so that I can manipulate it.”
Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
While there’s been a growing chorus of voices against A.I., which Kremer characterizes as “a certain fear / dismissiveness / snobbishness” toward the technology, for him, there remains creative potential in “using new tools for otherwise ancient practices.”
He points to a round silicone coaster he owns, which could be bent into different shapes to cast interesting shadows—certainly visual fodder for one of his canvases.
“I want to create a digital tool that helps me instantly visualize many variations of that. I might paint these images or even recreate these forms into large-scale silicone sculptures that people can manipulate themselves,” he said. “How do I do that? Why not start with A.I.?”
“Paul Kremer: Spring” is on view at Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, March 4–April 26, 2023. 
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