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Chinalog, 1987, pastel on paper, 44” x 37” (frame 48” x 41”)
Christopher Brown was born in 1951 in Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, where his father, Bruce, was a doctor. When he was three, his family moved to Ohio, and his interest in art began to bud. He had his mother to enroll him in Saturday morning art classes in a neighbor's home; an interest in art is among Brown's earliest memories. Painting for Brown continues to be connected with the formation and sensation of memory; that moment in his childhood during the move to Ohio, when harmony was disrupted just as his conceptualization of the world began.
When Brown was 13, his family moved again, this time to Illinois. His father became the student-health director at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where Brown attended college and majored in painting. After he graduated in 1973, he went to art school at the University of California at Davis. The faculty included Thiebaud, Wiley, Roy De Forest, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Roland Peterson. At Davis, Brown began to think seriously about the concept of Pop Art in Great Britain as well as in America. To Brown, this concept meant both the presence-absence of the media image, the tension between its immediacy and yet its distance from us and from the reality to which it refers.
After the first year at Davis, he took a year off and went to Europe on a grant from the University of Illinois. He spent several months in Spain, visiting the Prado, settling briefly in Malaga. Brown then went to Munich, where he spent most of the winter. Brown returned to Davis, where he graduated in 1976. After his graduation Brown spent five years on the move. First he moved to Woodland, an old farming community outside of Davis, where he taught part-time at American River College in Sacramento. Then in 1978, he moved to San Francisco, where he not only painted but also wrote art criticism for Artweek magazine in Oakland.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
1951 Born in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina
1972 University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, B.F.A.
1974 - 1975 Mary C. McLellan Scholarship for independent study and travel in Europe
1973 - 1976 Regents’ Fellowship, University of California, Davis
1976 University of California, Davis, M.F.A.
1978 - 1979 DAAD Grant, guest artist affiliation with the Academy of Art in Munich
1979 National Endowment for the Arts Special Projects Grant in Art Criticism
1981 National Endowment for the Arts Special Projects Grant in Art Criticism
1984 Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley
1985 Eureka Fellowship, The Mortimer Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, CA
1986 Award in the Visual Arts, given by the Equitable and
Rockefeller Foundations with partial support from the National Endowment for the Arts
1987 National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting
1988 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2008 John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California
2006 John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2005 Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, California
2004 Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley, ID; Rail Variations -solo
John Berggruen Gallery, San Fransisco, CA -solo
Paulson Press, Berkeley, California
2002 John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA -solo
2001 Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley, ID -solo
Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, MO -solo
Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley, ID
San Jose Museum of Art, "Prints from Paulson Press"
Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, MO - solo
2000 Friesen Gallery, Seattle, WA-solo
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "The Anderson Collection", San Francisco, CA
Achenbach Foundation, California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
"Prints from the Anderson Collection", San Francisco, CA
Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek Art Center,
"Abstraction from Raucous to Refined", Walnut Creek, CA
1999 Campbell Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA -solo
Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Palo Alto Art Center "The Great Novel Exhibition" Palo Alto, CA
Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Huntington Museum, Huntington, WV -solo
Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY -solo
Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley, ID
1997 Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, Minneapolis, MN -solo
Friesen Gallery, Celebrating Ten Years, Sun Valley, ID
1995 - 96 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, History and Memory: Paintings by Christopher
Brown, Fort Worth, TX -solo. Traveled exhibition, selected venues: San Jose
Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI;
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Edward Thorp Gallery,
Christopher Brown - Recent Paintings, New York, NY
1989 - 90 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 10 + 10: Contemporary Soviet
and American Painters, Fort Worth, TX. Traveled exhibition, selected venues:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Artist's Union Hall of the Tretyakov Embankment, Moscow
Tsentralnyi Zystavochnyi Zal, Leningrad
1988 Award Recipients' Exhibition, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,
New York, NY
1985 - 86 Madison Art Center, The Painted Room, Madison, WI -solo
Traveled exhibition, selected venues:
Matrix Gallery, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA
University Art Museum, Santa Barbara, CA
Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, CA
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Achenbach Collection of Prints and Drawings,
California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California
Bank of San Francisco, San Francisco, California
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California
Bank of America, San Francisco, California
Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, New York
Coca Cola Corporation, Atlanta, GA
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, New York
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Hughes Air West, Los Angeles, California
Johnson County Community College Art Gallery, Overland Park, Kansas
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
M.H.deYoung Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California
Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith, Inc., Los Angeles, California
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas
New York Public Library, New York, New York
Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida
Palm Springs Desert Art Museum, Palm Springs, California
Prudential Insurance Co. of America; Minnesota, California and New Jersey
Rayovac Corporation, Madison, Wisconsin
Redding Museum, Redding, California
Rosenburg Capital Management, San Francisco, California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Security Pacific National Bank, San Francisco, California
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska
PARTNERS COLLECTION
CHRISTOPHER BROWN
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