Delia Brown (born 1969) is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from California. She is one of several artists who gained notice at a moment when much attention was being paid to the graduates of Los Angeles-area MFA programs.
Life and work
Brown graduated from
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
in 2000 with an MFA and
UC Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...
in 1992 with a BA in studio art.
Best known for painted scenes that include her friends cavorting in places of specific privilege (such as art collectors' homes), Brown gained notoriety in October 2000 when ''
The New York Times Magazine
''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine Supplement (publishing), supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted man ...
'' ran an eight-page spread of her watercolors posing as fashion editorial. This publication coincided with her debut exhibition at D'Amelio Terras gallery in
Chelsea
Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to:
Places Australia
* Chelsea, Victoria
Canada
* Chelsea, Nova Scotia
* Chelsea, Quebec
United Kingdom
* Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames
** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...
, titled What! Are You Jealous? (featuring scenes of women drinking champagne poolside in Beverly Hills-ish backyards, with the title borrowed from a
Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (, ; ; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of colour and Synthetism, Synthetist style that were d ...
painting of Tahitian women lounging likewise), which was attacked by Times critic
Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman (born May 8, 1958) is the architecture critic for ''The New York Times'' and has written about public housing, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure and urban design. He has report ...
who called the buzz around her work a "pseudo-event".
Brown's work is primarily engaged in exploring desire as an individuated experience that connects the personal to the collective unconscious, often mediated through advertising and commercial culture. Referencing early bourgeois painting genres, she paints herself and friends enacting their own fantasies of being part of the leisure class, with props from snacks and beverages to million-dollar artworks functioning as important accessories in the assumption of privilege.
In interviews, Brown has often referenced her upbringing in a left-wing activist family as influential in her choice of subject matter. She has expressed discomfort about the role of the painter/artist as serving as high-status entertainment and decor for the patron class, and much of her work seems to contain a subtle grain of hostility, implying the discomfort she feels in her own complicity in this economic arrangement.
Brown's background includes several years pursuing a career as a hiphop lyricist in a two-girl group called The Fuzz (with Evelyn Charlot, a.k.a. Evenflo), as well as studies in the
Stanislavsky Method
Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing" ...
of acting. These experiences inform Brown's practice in various ways including her use of role-playing and dress-up for her paintings, and occasional forays into performance and video.
Brown has worked with actress Hollis Witherspoon in developing a fictional artist character called Chelsey Green, whose paintings and performances Brown devises and then hands off to Witherspoon the job of playing "author" to the projects. To date, Witherspoon-as-Green has been seen in a painting and video exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles (2006) titled Step-and-Repeats and Double Self-Portraits.
Witherspoon also plays a character in Brown's on-going project titled Felicity and Caprice, a narrative series of paintings and drawings which draw upon
Claude Chabrol
Claude Henri Jean Chabrol (; 24 June 1930 – 12 September 2010) was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave (''nouvelle vague'') group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues an ...
's camp masterpiece of 1960s French cinema, ''
Les Biches
''Les biches'' () ("The Hinds" or "The Does", or "The Darlings") is a one-act ballet to music by Francis Poulenc, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska and premiered by the Ballets Russes on 6 January 1924 at the Salle Garnier in Monte Carlo. Nij ...
''. A series of drawings on this theme was exhibited at D'Amelio Terras in 2007 and received praise from critics. Writing in ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', Martha Schwendener says "Ms. Brown has taken hold of a cache of references, from commercial illustration to French erotic cinema, and spun it into a deadpan, streamlined narrative about women, friendship and patronage".
[Schwendener, Martha (April 27, 2007).]
Art in Review; Delia Brown
. New York Times.
Brown is the recipient of the 2019 Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. In her recent work, Brown has stopped using photographs as a source material in favor of a heavy stylization influenced by Futurism and Cubism. These new paintings were exhibited in her 2018 solo exhibition Demoiselles d’Avignon at Tibor de Nagy in New York.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Delia
1969 births
Living people
American women painters
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Painters from California
21st-century American women artists