#47 Frederick J. Brown

Hello, Jonathan.

Yeah, is everything okay?

Uh?

Huh?

To what do I owe this?

This pleasure? I'm reporting this week's episode.

Yes, that's right.

I don't know why I said it was such trepidation in my voice. I am yeah you are. Every episode needs.

What you got to have the theme music?

Yeah, even before that.

Oh, I know what you're getting at the cold open where.

You call someone trying to live their life, like your friend Jackie Cohen, and ask them a bunch of stuff that they don't have the time or interest in answering.

I see what's going on.

The tables have turned. See how you like being called out of the blue, asked a bunch of questions?

Do you like it?

Oh?

You like it? Do you like it? If I start saying like what do you like better? Lollipops or gum?

Why too?

I've alreat had a small hat on with that endear you to it?

Oh? Definitely.

If you were a dog, what do you think your name would be?

Probably the same name, Jonathan Goldstein.

Do you remember that time that you referred to George Clooney as the gray haired doctor from er I did.

No idea?

Yeah you did, Yes, you did. You were like who's that gray haired doctor from R And I was like George Clooney and you were.

Like, yeah, I guess the thing that we're learning from this is I like being Jackie Cohen.

From Gimlet Media. I'm Khalila Holt and this is Heavyweight Today's episode Frederick J. Brown right after the break. Every Friday night during the pandemic, I'd get on a Google hangout with a group of my boyfriend's friends and we'd all play Mario kartlind you, how did you see spread?

Again? There's no PAM six races.

These Mario Kart sessions started back in the days when we could barely leave the house due to COVID restrictions, so it felt like an escape to log on to carelessly karine in a small car or kart if you will, through a gold mine or off a waterfall. In those dark days, a few minutes on Mount Warrio was the closest thing I could get to a vacation, right, let's be bad. That being said, I also found these Mario Kart hangouts deeply intimidating because I'm not good at Mario Kart.

Oh I'm happy sat on Instagram, Happy Believe Birthday.

And chatting of any kind is another thing I'm not good at. Every so often I'd weigh in with something like pretty crazy. This was essentially the extent of my engagement until the night Maya told us about the painting. Maya found the painting sitting in a pile of trash on the sidewalk, and it grabbed her instantly. It was only later, when she took it home that she saw

Oh, very like regal building.

I feel like.

My irl chatting is truly no better than my Mario Kart chatting saying here else it is.

Yeah.

What I couldn't see on the small square of our Mario Kart calls was that every surface of Maya's apartment is covered in art. Not only has Maya worked in the art world for many years at galleries art publishers, her husband, Wes, is also an artist himself. He even proposed to Maya on the steps of the met There's really only one spot in their apartment that's empty, a

I just kept going back to it. It just was different from all of the other paintings I've seen. It just really kind of grabbed me, and I started trying to get it out of the trash.

Clutching the huge painting to her body. Mayawardly waddled the mile home.

There's like a little garbage juice at the bottom and a little dust at the top, and I was walking.

I wouldn't let it sit on the ground.

I know I had probably been on the street all day, but I didn't want it to be on the street anymore. It is nearly as long as I am tall, and I'm five four, lots of color and patterns.

Despite my fondness for the audio medium, it fails to translate the force of Brown's painting. It's not as easily encapsulated as say the Mona Lisa Smiling Woman or American Gothic unsmiling woman and man. It's mostly abstract, but then there are these tiny spots with recognizable figures.

You can see faces and there's these horizontal bands that sort of organize the composition.

Admiring the painting with makes me feel like I'm at a fancy party, enjoying or jerves, but also panicked that I have nothing intelligent to say that kind OFT's like a seven. The painting feels like a stained glass cabinet full of curios. It feels like a quilt if a quilt weren't made of fabric, but a fields and buildings and people rushing to work. It feels like a packed

Painted nineteen seventy nine December title Genesis two Love Happy Birthday from Frederick to Lowry Simms, and then he signed it and dated it in nineteen seventy nine.

Maya may not have known the name Frederick Brown, but she knew the name Lowry Simms quite well. Larry was the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and before that she'd been the first black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She's now in her seventies and has had dec it's of impact on the art world. She's reached living legend status.

You can't help but be like, oh, okay, yeah, should I have not used a paper towel to clean this?

The way Maya sees it, if you find something with someone else's name on it, whether that's a wallet, a cat, or a painting, you try to give it back to them. And so she wants to return the painting to its rightful owner, Lowry Simms. And once we find her, maybe Lowry can help piece together how the painting ended up in the garbage. I would like love to help try and get in touch with this person.

Yes, please, okay?

My garbage hunting an abject failure but my people hunting that's going to be an abject success. I can't find an email address for Lowry. So I do what we all do when we want to pester someone more important than we are. I send a message on LinkedIn. I explain that I have a painting I think belongs to her, but perhaps fearing I'm running some sort of con where I trade paintings for Social Security numbers, Lowry doesn't respond, HI,

I don't know why she would even need LinkedIn, how it's like her career is very well stablished.

Chloe is also confused by how the painting ended up in the trash. She says Lowry can't have been the one to throw it away because Lowry doesn't live in Brooklyn and never has. Chloe agrees to reach out to her on my behalf and now that the request isn't coming from Rando on LinkedIn, but Randa, who knows Chloe Bass, Lowry responds, we have a few back and forths of her email. I'm hoping to schedule a time for us

So here's the backstory. Yeah, the painting is part of a larger painting called Genesis. Okay, that's in the collection of the MET.

Oh, whoa, I didn't know that.

So my dad became the youngest artist to be in the collection of the MET at that time. I get thirty three. Geez, let's say that. Actually thirty four okay, and like on top of that, right as a black artist, right this deal? So Part one is at the MET.

Part one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part two in a trash heap on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Bentley can't wait to see his father's painting in person, so he makes the drive from the Bronx to Maya's apartment in Brooklyn.

Hi.

And I'm hoping maybe Bentley will have insight into how his dad's painting ended up in the trash. Should we look at this painting and then maybe we can talk. We all file into the living room, where Maya and her husband West have propped the painting up against a wall for Bentley to look at. Bentley takes it in.

This is amazing it's just like, this makes me so happy.

He's it's your first time.

Yeah, I've never seen this.

Bentley's dedicated years of his life to his father's work, but he can't tell me how the painting ended up in the trash. Before I reached out, he hadn't even known Genesis Too existed. He bends down to get a closer look.

He didn't just stumble upon any piece within his catalog. He stumbled upon a extremely important piece.

It turns out the Genesis two was painted at the moment when Brown was making a transition. That's why it looks so different than anything else I'd seen online. Brown was moving away from abstraction and towards more figurative work. So among the shapes and lines, you see faces, an airplane and the fox figure, and it's like a self portrait.

Do you know why your dad chose fox as a symbol of representation.

That's a good question. You have to be a fox to survive in the art world as a black man, have to be. Everybody looks at the fox as like like a nefarious sort of character, right, But my dad kind of looked at it as like, nah, that's just like that's just a cad that has to do whatever it has to do to survive.

Bentley tells us about his dad's life, about Frederick Brown's childhood on the South Side of Chicago, how Brown's dad managed to juke joint, hanging around blues musicians like Muddy Waters. Early on, color made a strong impression on Brown. He grew up mixing paint for the luxury cars his uncle worked on. Later, Brown found work in the steel mills, the colors of the hot metal burning their way into his mind.

Because he'd always talked about how like bright orange the ingots were. You can see the bright orange in there.

Brown attended college in Illinois and eventually moved to New York, where he set up shop in a huge loft on Worcester Street and soho other artists and musicians were always stopping by, for Mayor Bearden, BB King, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. The Western Street loft is where Brown painted Genesis.

So then after that he signed with Marlboro Gallery, and so that was a big deal because Marlboro Gallery was the hottest gallery at that time. We talk about like Basqueiacht being the first black artist to sort of make that break. It was really my dad, like, I'm not even gonna hold you like I'm I'm not going to I'm not going to.

Sugarcoat it, you know. But while Bosquia went on to become a household name, selling paintings for millions of dollars, Frederick J. Brown did not. So what happened. It turns out that even after signing with Marlborough, Brown wasn't being shown in the way he thought he should be.

My dad kept trying to get like a retrospective, and he couldn't get a retrospective anywhere.

So Brown took matters into his own hands when a Taiwanese artist named C. J. Yao invited him to come to China. It was nineteen eighty eight and communist China was just starting to culturally open up. Only one other American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, had shown work in the country. But together Brown and Yao decided, let's do a Frederick J. Brown retrospective in China.

And they decided to do it in the National Museum of China, which like is on Tienamen Square and it's like an insanely huge building.

The museum had been filled with relative chairman Mao and the Communist revolution. But all that was cleared out to make room for one hundred Frederick J. Brown paintings, and.

He had a lot. I mean he had sixty thousand people a day for like thirty days.

Wow.

He had to go to China to have a red. He had to go to China to be seen as an American.

Artist because in America, Brown was seen as a black artist. And despite what he accomplished in China, when he returned to the States, he hadn't earned any additional prestige.

Instead, Marlborough was pissed that he did the show because they did it without his without their consent. He took out a loan to do it himself of half a million dollars. He had no way of paying it back. So that was like the beginning of I don't want to say the end, but it was the beginning of like a real hardship.

Marlborough dropped him. The bank was trying to take all his work, which he'd put up as collateral. He was only able to save some paintings by erasing his name entirely so the bank would think they weren't his. Other paintings he hid in the walls of his Worcester Street loft. Brown continued to paint for the rest of his life, but he never regained that blue trip cachet from his early career. He didn't become a name that a non art person like me, or even an art person like

You go up to these people that are gatekeepers and you plead your case. Most people are just like, whatever, there's not a market for it right now, right, and it's like it's like, man, fuck you.

It's the same story for a lot of black artists. Sure, these gatekeepers want black art, Bentley says, but they want a particular kind of black art. They want art they can look at and go, ah, yes, I get it. This is about the politics of being black in America.

When we think about black art or black artists, right, we are very quick to add like a political tag to the thing. I mean, I guess you could argue that blackness in and of itself is a political thing. But my dad was kind of much more of the camp of like just like make art for art's.

Sake, but purely aesthetic work by a black artist. That's what ends up in the garbage.

It's such a painful feeling. It's such a yeah, painful is the word, And such a painful feeling when you know that, like you have such a special world and people don't give a shit.

What is I mean?

Like if you have to describe, like what what that special world was?

Like?

What how would you explain it? Bentley points of the painting still leaning against the wall?

Is that right there? So much color, so much emotion, so much beauty. You two recognized it.

The beanting definitely called to me.

Yeah, I mean you rescued it right like, and it's like a piece of my dad. It's like his energy, his spirit is him. You know that was my dad calling out to you. That's what that was. You're like, yeah, let me go in the trash. My son lives not too far away. Don't let me go in the trash.

Well, Bentley was able to trace the path that led Frederick Brown's work to the metaphorical trash heap. I'm still wondering about the literal trash heap, the one on a Brooklyn sidewalk, and so, of course I'm still wondering about Larry Simms. It turns out Bentley knows Lowry well. The two are even writing a book together. When I ask Bentley about Lowry's aversion to speaking with me, he alludes to some bad experiences she's had with journalists, but he

I mean, I was in, you know, as this black girl from Queens. I had a career nobody would have expected at that time. I was in places where nobody expected at the time. I mean I used to tell people.

You know.

It was a struggle to get past the ignorance about black artists.

Like once in the seventies Lowry organized an exhibit of black art from the METS collection.

And when we got the exhibition up, I was approached by a journalist and said, I didn't even know they.

Were black artists.

Now this is like nineteen seventy nine. Come on, jeez, yeah yeah, yeah, so I said, where we've been around since the late eighteen hundred.

Hearing this story, it starts to make sense why Lowry might have been reluctant to speak with me, a white looking journalist she's never met. In fact, when I spoke with Bentley, he said Lowry had wanted him to suss me out, to make sure that I was okay, before she agreed to talk to me. Like his dad, Bentley said, Lowry too has had to be a fox. Larry and Brown's friendship endured for decades, starting in that Worcester Street loft and lasting until Brown's death, and even after he died,

It's a regional work, you know, it's strong work. I'm just hopeful that, you know, Frederick gets written into the you know, the art lexicon in the way that he needs to be.

When I ask Lowry why this hasn't happened yet, like Bentley, she cites the aftermath at the China trip, but she also offers this, he.

Sort of left New York at a crucial period in his career, and he put the concerns of his family first.

And it's true. In the nineties, Brown left New York for a town called Carefree, Arizona. A big factor in that decision was his daughter's asthma. Brown knew the dry desert heat would be good for her, and although money was still tight, the family was happy out in Arizona. Bentley recalls his dad attending his flag football games in his signature White Brooks Brothers suit, sweating in the Arizona Son and dabbing his forehead with napkins. Well, some children

I mean, I sort of, like, you know, kind of figured out that I probably gazed the painting to someone who admired it.

You know.

I can't remember who because it you know, because it was certainly too big for my low apartment.

As it turns out, Brown had painted Lowry Genesis two as a thank you gift because she had been the curator who bought Genesis one for the Mets collection. But the painting was huge, and Lowry ran into the problem that so many New Yorkers do. Living in a cramped apartment on the Upper east Side, she just hadn't had space for it. For Lowry, there was no blank wall above the couch, just waiting for something to be hung. So instead she found Genesis two a good home with a friend who loved it.

And I think I told Fred, you know, like about six Yeah, how it ended up with, amya find it? I don't know. I just can't remember who I might have given it to.

I suspect that Lowry might be trying to protect a friend. Maybe that's why she'd been reluctant to talk about the painting's loss. Maybe Larry gave the painting to someone who moved to a smaller apartment themselves, or maybe they died or fell on hard times and decided to sell it. Maybe it was regifted to someone else, or sold in a state sale, or just lost in the general shuffle

Well, you know, there's a saying that ninety eight percent of all the art created in the world since the beginning is gone.

Do you think like the best stuff somehow makes it through? Do you know what I mean?

I think it's totally random. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's why we have museums, you know, because they can be seen as places where these things can be safe. But I mean, just look, it was happening now in the Ukraine, you know, the Palming museums and cultural sites. So I think a lot of times it's just the luck of the draw.

Time is the most capricious of curators. A few weeks earlier, when Bentley came by Maya's apartment, we all sat around and talked for hours about art and family, and finally, when it was time to go, Maya turned to Bentley and said, I don't think the painting belongs with me. I think it belongs somewhere else. Bentley's taller than my and had no problem lifting up the canvas. He thanked Maya warmly and carried Genesis Too out the door to his car. He'd serve as the paintings caretaker until Lowry

Yeah, it's been accepted by the Studio Museum as a donation. Oh, that's great, and the donation will be from me, from the estate of the artists, and from Maya.

On a warm Friday afternoon, I pay Maya visit her regal apartment building.

Hello.

She and Wes are signing the paperwork to officially donate the painting to the Studio Museum, and I'm here to serve as a witness. Lowry and Bentley have both already signed. Knowing how much Maya loves the painting, I thought giving it up would be bittersweet, but she's in high spirits. She likes the idea of Genesis Too hanging in a museum that way, thousands of people will get to enjoy it. We'll lean towards the plaque and read the name Frederick J. Brown.

Thank you.

On my way out, I noticed that the big wall above Maya's couch is still blank.

Now that the furnitures returning to its goodwill.

Home, Now that the last month's rent is scheming with.

The damage to pos take this moment to do so.

If we mint it, if we travel felt around for far too from things good accidentally. This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me Khalila Holt along with Jonathan Goldstein. Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Domiano Marquetti, special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Lydia Polgreen, Mercy Flynn, Carl McCool, Caitlin Kenny, and Kayla Lattimore, with extra special thanks to Sam Riceman. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with