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Joan Brown, 'Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat' 1970

Joan Brown, Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat, 1970. Oil enamel on masonite, 96 x 48 inches.

Collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK.

© 2022 the Estate of Joan Brown. 

Now on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: Women Painting Women, including a major self-portrait by Joan Brown.

Women Painting Women is a thematic exhibition featuring 46 artists who choose women as subject matter in their works, surveying some of the most prominent female painters across generations. Focusing on painting as the primary medium, the exhibition includes nearly 50 works spanning the 1960s to the present, including Joan Brown’s 1970 ’Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat.’ This painting by Brown dates from the early 1970s, a crucial period when she began working on masonite panels in enamel house paint. Brown presents herself in her painting clothes straight-on, holding a paint brush in her right hand and a large golden fish, a symbol of her creativity, in her left. Below, a black cat, one of Brown’s alter egos, brushes against her leg.

See Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, through September 25, 2022.