Term: February – May
Owen Brown was born in Chicago, trained as a classical musician, took his first art class at 23, and much of what he’s wanted to do since then has been paint. Brown holds degrees from Yale College and the University of Chicago, and was a degree student at California College of the Arts. He lived for over 30 years in San Francisco, where he was represented by Meridian Gallery. He now lives in Minneapolis.
Brown has exhibited in juried shows and solo exhibits throughout the United States, Europe and Canada. His works can be found in collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including San Francisco’s De Young and Minneapolis’ Weisman Museums.
Brown serves as a mentor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He has received residencies in the United States, France, and Germany, his work has been published in a number of revues, and critical catalogs have been issued by Meridian Gallery, 4128 Editions, and Black Mountain Ranch press.
Spanning the gamut from expressive figuration to poor abstraction, Brown writes of his work:
“Uncover beauty. Evoke emotion. Excite and surprise. Identify injustice. These, then, the purposes to which art could be put. At our best we want to reveal, and repair the world.”
“Of this, thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking. The source of my practice is the world with all its beauty and confusion – nature, so alien and alluring, the social, equally baffling but no less wonderful, and the uncomfortable friction between that, and our internal interpretations. Life eludes easy understanding or conclusion: what are we seeing when we really think about it and how did we miss it before?”
