Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest@Phillip's Collection

This exhibit is wonderful in that Vivian Browne is such a fabulous artist with an outstanding career, yet she is virtually unknown. She is a teaching artist, an arts administrator and a public artist whose work spans a period and time when Black art and artists were making both national and international noise, yet we don't know her work. 

When I saw the title of the exhibition I knew this was a n

Black woman artist. Revolutionary and Black are synonymous in my lexicon. I'd never heard of the Phillips Collection. I hadn't known Georgetown's history as a Black town post Civil War. It's where the Black people who'd been enslaved formed encampments and eventually a citystate until their descendents were later pushed out. But that is another story. I wonder if this is where Sojourner Truth visited to teach the newly freed what today is called life skills: personal hygiene, cooking and cleaning? 

The Phillips Collection story which I learned over the course of our visit was a lovely one illustrated by the care and attention given to the work in the various galleries, especially the permanent collection which rotates. Imagine, the curator Phillips was friend to the artists whose work we're exploring. 

The Essex Hemphill exhibit drew me to the museum, yet it took me over an hour after arrival to make my way to it. I met Browne's work first. 

I saw other artists whose work I knew like Simone Leigh's too as I moved between the galleries. On my way out I saw Jacob Lawrence's Migration series and learned why Phillips has only part of it. 

The self portrait and the portrait of her mother, the series of Little (White) Men, Browne's abstracts after her trip to Nigeria and Ghana, her work on silk juxtaposed to work on canvas and her later sequoia landscapes in Califoria are among my favorite works.

I also like reading about her activism expressed on buttons and posters. My friend commented that Browne wasn't marginalized like Faith Ringgold whose work was not considered fine arts. Notheless the fact that Browne's body of work is just having this major retrospective now shows how Black women artists are still invisible. 

The Essex Hemphill exhibit is so intimate. I met him through Marlon Riggs. There are so many artists represented here who speak to Hemphill's impact on their lives and work. It's an Ase. It's a shrine. It's a meditation on the brevity of our moment in the light before day ends. Hemphill and Browne inspire visitors to get busy before this period ends much to soon. 

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