Painting Power: The Radical Vision of Vivian Browne
Collage honoring the work of Vivian Brown. Photo retrieved from Wikipedia.
By Karla Méndez
Examining how Vivian Browne’s art and activism bridged the Black liberation and feminist movements while redefining the politics of representation.
Vivian Browne’s career traversed the overlapping terrains of feminism, Black liberation, and modernism. Emerging in an era that offered little institutional support for either women or Black artists, she crafted a language of protest that was subtle, ironic, and deeply intellectual. Her paintings and activism interrogated the structure that shaped visibility itself: who is seen, who is named, who is remembered. From her satirical Little Men series to her leadership in the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and SoHo20 Gallery, Browne’s life was a sustained inquiry into the politics of representation and the conditions of creative freedom.
Emerging Radicalism
Vivian Browne was born on April 26th, 1929 in Laurel, Florida, and raised between South Jamaica, Queens, and Kern County, California. That sense of movement and multiplicity would come to define her artistic lens: an awareness of how identity forms across geography, class, and culture. Browne earned both her BS and MFA from Hunter College, in 1950 and 1959, respectively. During a period when Black women artists were largely excluded from formal art education, Browne’s persistence reflected both intellectual ambition and social defiance. She received a scholarship from the New School for Social Research, a Huntington Hartford Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, awards that helped her sustain an independent practice. In 1972, she traveled to Nigeria to study at the University of Ibadan. That experience, her first direct encounter with Africa, profoundly altered her visual vocabulary, feeding into her Africa Series (1971-74), a body of abstract landscape paintings that tried to grasp an ancestral homeland simultaneously familiar and foreign.
In 1971, Browne joined Rutgers University in Newark as a professor in the Department of Arts and Sciences, where she remained until 1992. She became the first Black American and only the second woman to earn full professorship at the university. At Rutgers, Browne taught courses in painting and in contemporary Black and Hispanic art, advocating for curricula that recognized non-white and non-male artistic contributions. She was deeply invested in mentoring young artists, many of whom recall her emphasis on rigor and ethical responsibility in artmaking. Beyond the classroom, Browne became a co-founder of SoHo20 Gallery in 1973, one of the first women’s cooperative galleries in Manhattan. Alongside Nancy Azara and Mary Beth Edelson, she helped establish a feminist exhibition space that challenged the male-dominated gallery system. The cooperative operated as both a site of solidarity and a protest exclusion.
“Vivian Browne’s career traversed the overlapping terrains of feminism, Black liberation, and modernism. Emerging in an era that offered little institutional support for either women or Black artists, she crafted a language of protest that was subtle, ironic, and deeply intellectual.”
Art as Activism
Browne’s political consciousness was inseparable from her art practice. In 1969, she joined the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), organized by Benny Andres, Faith Ringgold, and others in response to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s controversial Harlem on My Mind (1969). The exhibition, while purporting to honor Harlem’s cultural achievements, excluded Black visual artists, instead presenting the neighborhood through photojournalism and commentary. Browne and other BECC members protested outside the museum, demanding inclusion of Black artists in major institutions and in curatorial leadership.
The BECC was not a single-issue protest group but a sustained movement demanding structural transformation within the art world. The coalition’s activism reverberated through New York’s art scene and directly influenced the Whitney Museum’s Contemporary Black Artists in American (1971), one of the first major institutional exhibitions to foreground living Black artists. Their actions signaled a refusal to allow Black cultural contributions to be filtered solely through white institutional authority. Though it's important to note that the BECC would later protest the exhibition due to the Whitney Museum reneging on two points of their original agreement. Browne’s participation placed her among artists for whom visibility, access, and self-representation were matters of collective survival. Through BECC, she demonstrated that activism was inseparable from her role as an educator and painter, insisting that access and representation were not optional but foundational to American cultural life.
Between the Political and the Human
Browne once said, “When I am political, I am painting as a Black person or as a woman or both. Otherwise, I am just a member of the human race.” Yet her understanding of the “human” was shaped by her lived experience as a Black woman in mid-century America. The very assertion of universality became political when the art world refused to see Black women as capable of representing it. Her Little Men series (1966-69) marked her first major breakthrough. These paintings and drawings depict grotesque, petulant male figures, middle-aged, white, and often mid-tantrum. Rendered in expressive brushwork and acidic color, the “little men” embody the gruesome nature of frustrated patriarchy. The works satirize white male authority, transforming dominance into absurdity.
During the late 1960s, while many Black artists embraced overly nationalist or figurative imagery, Browne’s turn toward psychological satire set her apart. She refused to monumentalize Black suffering as spectacle, instead examining the pathology of whiteness. In doing so, she broadened the terms of political art-away from representation of victimhood toward systemic critique. Her Africa Series (1971-74), painted after her Nigerian sojourn, offered a different tone. Browne described them as attempts to “capture the feeling of an ancestral land that would remain foreign to me.”
Though aligned with the feminist artists of the 1970s, Browne was sharply attuned to the racial blind spots within the movement. She contributed to Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and helped develop its 1982 issue, Racism Is the Issue, which addressed the exclusion of women of color within feminist circles. Her essays and editorial input positioned her as a crucial communicator between feminist and Black liberation discourses, insisting that neither could be pursued in isolation.
“Browne refused to simplify identity politics. She neither romanticized nor disavowed them. Her art insists that politics live not only in image but in structure, in who gets to make, teach, exhibit, and be remembered. As she once said, when she is political, she paints as a Black person, a woman, or both. In an art world still grappling with who counts as “universal,” that insistence remains radical. ”
My Kind of Protest
Browne’s legacy operates on multiple levels. As an artist, she demonstrated that satire, irony, and abstraction could be powerful modes of protest. As an educator, she transformed Rutgers’ curriculum and mentored generations of artists. As an activist, she built coalitions that demanded accountability from institutions while creating alternative spaces where marginalized artists could thrive. Her influence is increasingly recognized. Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest, mounted at the Phillips Collection in 2025 was the first major retrospective of her work in decades. The title, taken from Browne’s own phrase, captures her ethos: protest as persistence, critique as care. Her paintings now reside in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Browne refused to simplify identity politics. She neither romanticized nor disavowed them. Her art insists that politics live not only in image but in structure, in who gets to make, teach, exhibit, and be remembered. As she once said, when she is political, she paints as a Black person, a woman, or both. In an art world still grappling with who counts as “universal,” that insistence remains radical.
About the author: Karla Méndez is an arts and culture writer whose work examines the histories of Black and Latin American women and their representations within visual art, literature, poetry, and performance. She is interested in how women put forth representations of themselves that are accurately representative of their expansiveness and how they use these avenues to engage with topics of identity, gender, race, and the female body. Ultimately, her work seeks to explore and reinstate forgotten and ignored histories as a site of care for ourselves and our communities.
She is the lead columnist of Black Feminist Histories and Social Movements, a column for the advocacy organization Black Women Radicals. She is a contributor for the Boston Art Review and Elephant Magazine and her work has appeared in the Brown Art Review and Ampersand: An American Studies Journal.