Irresistibly Weird

Bay Area artist Joan Brown, who died in 1990 at age fifty-two, produced a vast body of figurative paintings with an offbeat, vernacular appeal. This exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan featured a dozen of Brown’s dazzling canvases, primarily from the 1970s, characterized by dreamily composed scenes and highly stylized figures.
Brown emerged within San Francisco’s Beat and burgeoning “Funk” art scenes of the 1960s, alongside friends such as Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, and Wall