2022    ‘Joan Brown’ San Francisco Museum of Art     Over five years in the making and over fifty years since her solo museum debut, Joan returns to SFMoMA and her home city. Capturing Brown’s artistic virtuosity and range in both subject matter and style, the exhibition ranges from her early expressionist canvases, through representational works in her iconically flat style, to the late symbolic paintings that reveal her interest in spirituality and self-exploration. While co-curators Janet Bishop and Nancy Lim chose to feature some of Joan’s most iconic works, the exhibition as a whole is a story of a daughter of San Francisco and one who left an indelible mark on the artistic community there. The expansive catalogue that accompanies the exhibition includes numerous first-person accounts from artists across generations who knew Joan and were impacted by her and her practice. True to Joan’s legacy, it offers a portrait of an artist who was more - a teacher, a woman, a mother and a uniquely independent spirit.
2011    ‘This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards’ San Jose Museum of Art     While Joan was an undeniable presence during her lifetime; after her death, there was a dearth of the kind of up-to-date contextualization of her painting it deserved. For those who knew her, Joan was a complex and forceful person, a quality that carries through in her work. Yet during her life, she rejected any categorization as a feminist, despite living and working through the movement’s most vocal periods. In retrospect, it is difficult to untangle her work from her identity - one that is inextricably connected to womanhood. Jodi Throckmorton’s attempt to tease apart the two placed Brown’s art back in the conversation, viewing it through the contemporary lens of feminist art.
1999    ‘Transformations: The Art of Joan Brown’ Oakland Museum/UC Berkeley     It was nearly ten years after her untimely death that the first posthumous retrospective was organized, a gargantuan undertaking spanning two venues and seeking to touch on almost every aspect of the prolific artist’s life and work. Exhaustive, authoritative and - by many accounts - unwieldly, the exhibition and its catalogue have served as the definitive reference on Brown and her work. However, as reviews of the exhibition pointed out, there was a lack of precision or contextualization for the huge volume of work it sought to contain. While the multivalent roles Joan personified in her life as well as her art were clearly defined, no compelling thesis emerged to place Brown outside the regionalist labels she had been tagged with throughout her career. As Brooks Adams noted in her Artforum review, “in their zeal to establish her singularity, the curators have sentenced Brown… [to] isolation."
1993    ‘Joan Brown: Paintings and Drawings’ Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford     This abbreviated exhibition was the first posthumous museum exhibition of Joan’s work, opening less than three years after her death. While the checklist included less than thirty paintings and works on paper, all dating from the 70s, it was the most significant presentation of her work on the east coast in years. More importantly, it brought together paintings, many now considered some of Brown’s strongest, that had rarely been shown since they were painted over twenty years previously. The critic Sanford Schwartz in speaking to the Hartford Journal pointed out that “her oeuvre is yet to be analyzed.” He went on to say of the exhibition, “the self-portraits are powerful, not just of the moment, and feel like the core of the artist, the core of her work.” Expressing a similar perspective in her review for the New York Times, Vivian Raynor notes, “Joan Brown stands out as a woman painter who succeeded without political folderol.” 1983    ‘From the Studio’ Mills College Art Gallery     Almost ten years following her UCB exhibition, Brown was invited to show at the Mills College art gallery. Rather than assemble a broader survey of her career, Brown and the staff chose to take a more holistic approach, showing a range of paintings from the recent past. In the essay for the exhibition, Charles Shere stressed the value in this approach, calling it “an opportunity… to clarify some of the issues raised” in her work: “what has Joan Brown’s painting been ‘about,’ and how does it connect to other recent painting.” For an artist like Brown, who tended to work serially, the result demonstrates the through-lines in her thinking over an exceptionally evolutionary stage in her work. Though the exhibition covers a relatively narrow period: 1978-1982, it reflects a spiritual journey of the self that Joan undertook during these years. The director of the gallery, Philip Linhares notes Brown’s “artistic integrity… [that] makes her an exemplary role model for all artists.” 1974    ‘Joan Brown’ University of California, Berkeley Art Gallery     The same year she was offered a position teaching at UC Berkeley, Brenda Richardson, the curator of the University’s museum, organized the first true retrospective of Brown’s work. It came near the beginning of an extraordinarily prolific period for the artist, as she was quickly gaining confidence working in the new style she had debuted just a few years previously. Shockingly, this would turn out to be the only lifetime retrospective for Brown, predating some of her most ambitious and accomplished paintings. Yet the exhibition stands out for being a truly collaborative effort between Brown and Richardson, perhaps singularly reflective of Brown’s own perspective of her work at the time. Indeed, Richardson describes Brown as “vigorously [opposing] the modern tendency to categorize art and artists into types or movements… [refusing] to think about her own work in those terms.” But crucially, she established Brown as “above all an artist and a woman who lives and works by her own measure” a characterization that would come to define Brown throughout her lifetime and after.