The Abstract Musicality of Frederick J. Brown

The blues is the litmus test for all creativity – Frederick J. Brown, 1997

I grew up in the studio of my father, Frederick J. Brown (1945–2012), where, in the midnight hours, the creative ‘spirits’, as he called them, were conjured through the catalytic force of Black music. To step into the studio was to leave the real world and be enveloped in the possibilities realized by ‘the music’, felt through sound, space, movement, texture, colour and community.

Raised in South Chicago, Brown was in close contact with ‘the music’ from a young age. His father, Andrew Bentley, managed a neighbourhood pool hall frequented by blues legends such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Etta James. St. Paul’s AME Church provided a front-row seat to Chicago’s historic gospel music tradition, while the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), pushed jazz towards the Afro-diasporic abstract rhythms of ‘openness’.

In 1970, after participating in AACM collaborations in Europe, Brown left Chicago for New York, taking up residence at SoHo’s 131 Prince Street (also known as Artist House), where free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman had established an avant-garde arts centre, which included a performance space, gallery and living quarters. Brown’s early paintings at Artist House reflect Coleman’s philosophy of harmolodics, which embraced abstraction as inherently interdisciplinary. Through Coleman, Brown was introduced to artists Daniel Johnson and Virginia Jaramillo. At their 109 Spring Street loft, they facilitated conversations around the contemporary limitations placed upon Black artists and abstract art. Collaborating with Johnson and Jaramillo, as well as Frank Bowling, Al Loving, Bill Hutson and Gerald Jackson, Brown embraced maximalist colour field painting, exploring depth, texture and narrative. In their griotic quality, Brown’s abstractions engage music, mythology, ancestry and cosmology.

While painting constituted the majority of Brown’s output, performance anchored his belief in ‘the music’ as a practice of freedom. In 1973, Brown and his collaborators staged Be Aware, a ‘funeral’ for art prompted by the continued silencing of Black voices within the contemporary scene. Organized at the Automation House, Brown blocked off 64th Street with garbage trucks, forcing invitees and passers-by alike to see Black artists.

That same year, Brown transformed a 5,000-square-foot loft at 120 Wooster Street into his own creative laboratory and community. Known as ‘Club Low-Flame’ owing to its delinquent utility bills, it staged musicians including the Revolutionary Ensemble and the artist-led Sex And Drugs Band, as Brown merged the worlds of ‘loft jazz’ and contemporary art. Brown also began filmed performance, initiating what would be a 25-year collaboration with pioneering video artist Anthony Ramos. In Portrait of an Artist (1974), the pair document the dramatic reveal of Brown’s first figurative abstractions, set to the live saxo- phone of Anthony Braxton. Guided by Romare Bearden and Willem de Kooning’s mentorship, Brown’s reconception of abstraction through figuration captures imaginative, allegorical, heterotopic, blues worlds: abstraction pushed into the nuances of lived experience.

Brown’s abstractions engage music, mythology, ancestry and cosmology.

Brown continued to expand his practice of abstraction to include portraiture, inspired by its synonymity with ‘mastery’ in Western art. As art historian Lowery Stokes Sims points out, Brown mapped likeness through assembling abstract planes, demonstrating that a portrait is a field of dramatic construction and ‘spiritual evocation’. Brown’s development of languages of figuration, portraiture and performance signalled an expansion of abstract aesthetics, foregrounding the possibilities that ‘the music’ could engender.

In 1988, Brown became the first Western artist to exhibit at Beijing’s Museum of the Chinese Revolution (today the National Museum of China) on Tiananmen Square. In the documentary film Mao Meets Muddy (1989), Ramos reveals that through visual expressions of Black music, Brown transformed the museum into a site of phono-visual revolution and cultural exchange. In one scene, a Chinese exhibition handler listens intently to a cassette of Muddy Waters’s 1982 album Rollin’ Stone. Closing his eyes, the young man drifts into another world. For my father, this was ‘the music’, the studio, a space of open possibility that made dreams tangible and freedom a creative reality.

Selected works by Frederick J. Brown are on view in the Spotlight section, exhibited by Berry Campbell on Stand S26.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters, London 2024 under the title ‘Abstract Worlds: Frederick J. Brown’.

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^{Main image: Frederick J. Brown, Lands of the Mind (detail), 1979, oil on canvas, 180 × 120 cm. Courtesy: © Estate of Frederick J. Brown and Berry Campbell, New York}