David J. Brown (artist)

David J. Brown is an American curator of contemporary art and culture, and a museum administrator.Trained as an artist and an administrator, Brown views curating as a collaborative and creative act; a bridge between the artist, the audience, and the organization. Inspired by the artist-run spaces that found their bearings in the mid-1970s and continue today, he supports multi-disciplinary, open-ended approaches, values community; at times investigates subjects outside of the field. Throughout his career, Brown has addressed a wide range of topics and issues, ranging from the visual expressions of terrorism (Beyond Glory: Re-Presenting Terrorism at the Maryland Institute, College of Art); mysticism and spirituality (Lesley Dill: Tongues on Fire, Visions and Ecstasy; creative, sustainable affordable housing, and the HOME House Project: the Future of Affordable Housing at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. In 2018-19, he was the guest curator of special projects at the Cincinnati Art Museum and oversaw the museum’s effort of hosting No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man from the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery. 
== Background ==
Brown was born in Coronado, California. His father (William Brown) was born in a log cabin in Buchanan, Georgia and his mother (Catherine Kopsick) was from Greenwich Village in New York. The forth of six siblings, Brown grew up in Norfolk, Virginia. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Old Dominion University (1980) and a Masters of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University (1983).
As a visual artist, Brown operated an active studio practice for fifteen years in Norfolk, Virginia, Washington (DC), and Baltimore, Maryland while working with other artists on their projects—the latter experience informed his career and his appreciation for collaborative efforts. Brown started his museum career at the Chrysler Museum of Art (1979) and curated his first exhibition there on renegade neon artists. In Washington, he performed free-lance exhibition design and installation work for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, American Art Museum, the National Building Museum, the Renwick Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and served on the board of the Washington Project for the Arts|Washington Projects for the Arts (1984-90). He landed his first full-time curatorial position as Director of Exhibitions at the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1989-96) and was Curator at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (1996-99), Senior Curator and the HOME House Project Director at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (1999-2006), the inaugural Deputy Director of Art at the Taubman Museum of Art (2006-2010) before becoming an independent curator and consultant.
As Director of Exhibitions at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, one of his first projects was Beyond Glory: Re-Presenting Terrorism, an international exhibition and accompanying symposium that explored the root causes of the topic. Co-curated with Nina Felshin, the exhibition featured thirty-six artists including Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, T.O.D.T., Shu Lea Cheang, Luis Cruz, Azaceta, Alison Saar, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Gregory Barsamian, and others. Brown conceived the idea of the exhibition when he interviewed for his position; before he knew that two students from the school (Gretchen Dater and Louise Ann Rogers) lost their lives in the Pan Am Flight 103|Pan Am 103 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Brown's design for the exhibition provided a context for the works: camouflage pattern painted walls (from the U.S. Army Camouflage Unit in Ft. Belvoir, VA), used barbed wire fencing, and close circuit cameras that spied on viewers. The symposium (organized by Dr. Robert Merrill, Leonora Foerstel, and Dr. Mark Neustadt) featured former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Randall Robinson, Angela Sanbrano, Alexander Cockburn, William Schaap, Edward Herman, Chris Bratton, Annie Goldson, and others. The book Violent Persuasions: The Politics and Imagery of Terrorism was published by M.I.T. Press in 1993.
Brown's next effort involved crafting a 'show within a show' as he brought the Kustom Kulture Von Dutch, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, Robert Williams, and Others exhibition to Baltimore. Originating from the Laguna Art Museum, the landmark exhibition championed the originators and innovators of the custom car world, and showed their influence on visual artists. Adding to the original show, Brown, along with Karl Ardo, a MICA alumnus, chose five hand-built 'rods' from the Mid-Atlantic region to exhibit, along with Ed Roth's Outlaw (from a collector in West Palm Beach). He commissioned exhibiting artist Suzanne Williams to 'curate' a hot rod soundtrack, and hired a local pinstripper to create period appropriate designs for light switches, display cases, paint one of the exhibiting cars, and teach a master class to the graduate school painters. One night before the opening reception, Brown and his staff stole the large Venus de Milo plaster cast from the school's 19th century admin building, transported it to one of the galleries and draped a Rat Fink t-shirt on the statute. 
While in Cincinnati at the Contemporary Arts Center, Brown organized large shows by Yoko Ono , Roy Lichtenstein: Man Hit by the 21st Century, and Theater of Excess: David Mach. Here he began consciously pairing exhibitions that he organized: (the traveling show) Michael Ray Charles with The Human Hammer Meets the Two Headed Woman: Sideshow Banners from the Great Midway; and A Chair is Just a Chair: The Furniture of Donald Judd with the crate sculptures of Richard Artschwager. 
Throughout his career, Brown has worked with several thousand artists and creatives from various disciplines on hundreds of exhibition projects, many large-scale. With the HOME House Project: the Future of Affordable Housing (2002-2007), he challenged artists, architects and designers to use the building plans from two Habitat for Humanity homes as a point of departure and design new single-family homes that were sustainable and environmentally-friendly. From the more than 800 individuals and teams from the U.S. and 16 countries who registered, more than 440 designs were received. The multi-year, multi-tiered initiative included a build stage (Cincinnati built the first two homes), displays of sustainable materials, a film program, three-dimensional models of the 25 award winners, and travelled nationally to 10 venues. A book was published with M.I.T. Press and featured essays by Brown, and jurors Michael Sorkin, Steve Badanes, and Ben Nicholson. The project was created while Brown was Chief Curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and evolved from their Artists and the Community series.
In 2006, Brown became the inaugural Deputy Director of Art for the soon to open Taubman Museum of Art, a 81,000 sq foot, $61 million project in Roanoke, VA. His curatorial strategies were derived from the building itself, designed by architect Randal Stout; a contemporary structure placed in the historic downtown--a bold mix of the old and the new; traditional and contemporary. As before, Brown began pairings of exhibitions in adjoining galleries: Sacred and Sordid: The Beggars in Rembrandt's Etchings with large-scale prints and a specially created 'tent city' festooned with 'modern' beggars and the dispossessed by artists Mike Houston and Martin Mazorra (known as Cannonball Press) and Peter Henry Emerson and American Naturalistic Photography with Eco-Sensing: Sam Easterson, that showed videos of the landscape made by attaching miniature remote-sensing cameras to the bodies of various animals, filming their daily life from their perspective.
In 2018-19, Brown co-founded the nonprofit DENT Creative Reuse Center and Art Laboratory, collaborating on special projects with other organizations in the Winston Salem, North Carolina region.
Category:American people
Category:American curators