Audrey Brown was born in Philadelphia in the middle of the Depression. Orphaned at age 6, foster parents raised her in Camden, New Jersey. After graduating from Harlem Hospital School of Nursing in 1955, she practiced, and taught nursing for eleven years before embarking on her journey as an artist. In the sixties, Audrey began painting in oils and acrylics as a pastime to help, she says, “her feelings about being a person of African descent in what she perceived as a hostile Eurocentric environment.”
In 1969, Brown moved to New York City while taking doctoral studies in nursing education she also studied drawing, painting and sculpture at New York University and Columbia University. In 1970, Brown had her first exhibition, in a two-woman show, “The Black Woman’s Statement” held at Countee Cullen Library in Harlem, New York City. The paintings in this show were mostly non-representational expressions of angst and a few paintings of African and African American women. In 1976, Audrey moved to Tennessee where she studied, practiced, and then taught nurse-midwifery. She also experimented with silkscreen printing, particularly the photographic method, on paper and with batik on cotton using synthetic dyes works focusing on African and African American women, children, and African designs.
After marriage in 1980 with artist James Brown Jr., with his encouragement she began to think of herself as an artist rather than thinking of art as a hobby. They moved to Florida, where she earned a masters degree in anthropology and began using natural dyes on silk, experimenting with African Adire resist methods. In 1982, she exhibited in the Fine Arts for Ocala, 16th Annual Images in Art” Group Exhibition. From 1983 –1990, as a concomitant of her anthropological work Audrey photographed, audio-, and video- taped what she was seeing and experiencing among Florida Afro-Baptists, Jamaica Revivalists, and Spiritual Baptists of Barbados. She incorporated these images into her work silk screened on fabric and embellished with quilting, trapunto, beads, sequins, gold braid, and shells. After moving to Washington, DC in 1985, she took printmaking courses at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. However, as Audrey puts it: “I am mostly self-taught with a lot of constructive input from my husband, James Brown Jr.”
In 2000, Audrey added Shibori resist techniques to her textiles and began creating digital collages on paper. Brown’s works since then in the series “Spiritual Visions,” “Inside the Ark of Safety?” and "Orishas," reflect her increasing preoccupation with the spiritual woman, spirit world, and the finite nature of material existence. Since 2004 she has exhibited in the “7th International Open Exhibition,” Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (2004); “Women in the Middle: Borders, Barriers, Intersections Exhibition,”, Union Art Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2004); “Convergence of Vision: The Power of Art,” Prince Georges County Community College, (2006); 11th International Open Exhibition, Woman Made Gallery,(2008); “Never Routine: Women in the Course of Their Daily Lives” Grace Institute, New York, (2008) ; La Femme: The Feminine, Project 3: Empowered by Artistry, Sewell-Belmont House & Museum, Washington, DC, (2008); “Remembering, Not to Forget,” Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Washington, DC (2008); “Year of Renewal,” Black History Month Art Exhibition ,Exxon Corporate Offices in Fairfax, VA (2009); Off the Grid, SDA Members Exhibition, Kansas City, MO, (2009) “ Black Migrations: Movements in Context, Community, and Faith,” 6th Annual Midwest Black History Conference, Luther College, Iowa (2009) and“12th International Open Exhibition,” Woman Made Gallery, (2009).
Audrey received a FY2008 Small Projects Award, and in FY2009, an Elders Learning Through the Arts Project Award from the District of Columbia Commission of the Arts and Humanities, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Audrey used the ELTA funds to conduct an eight-week African textile design workshop for seniors in the DC Department of Parks and Recreation.
The artist states: “As I end the seventh decade of my life, my work centers ever more around my concerns about transitioning between the material and spiritual worlds. Brown’s current works in the series “Where Spirit Lives “ are multi-media creations that combine digital or silk-screen printing, batik with various resist methods, use of natural and synthetic dyes on silk fabric embellished with bead embroidery.
A member of the Black Artists of DC, Woman Made Gallery, Surface Design Association, and the Textile Society of America, Audrey says, “My art and I are both works in progress.”
