Fall Opening at the Sugar Hill Childrens Museum of Art and Storytelling

Frederick J. Brown: Dreams and the Possibility of… About Frederick J. Brown Frederick James Brown (1945-2012) was a New York City-based American artist raised in Chicago's Southside. Brown's work reflects upon his early exposure to the sounds and personalities of the blues and jazz while engaging themes of the urban fabric, spirituality, and Americana. During the 1970s and 1980s Brown’s SoHo, Manhattan studio, 120 Wooster Street, became a central gathering place for musicians, writers, and visual and performance artists. In SoHo, Brown collaborated with, among others, painter Romare Bearden, jazz musician Ornette Coleman, and poet Felipe Luciano, developing a genre-bending approach to his painting that incorporated elements of abstract and figurative expressionism, collage, portraiture, and performance. In 1990, Brown settled in Arizona, continuing his practice in both New York and Phoenix. Brown’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Brown’s notable one-man exhibitions include retrospectives at the Studio Museum of Harlem, Marlborough Gallery and the National Museum of China in Beijing, where in 1988 he became the first Western artist to have his works exhibited in what was the Museum of the People’s Revolution (now the National Museum of China). Major works include The Last Supper (1983); The Assumption of Mary (1992), a three-story-high, single canvas painting permenantly hung at Xavier University's University Library in New Orleans; The History of Art(1990s), a group of 110 interlocking paintings on permanent display in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; and his extensive series of over 350 portraits of jazz and blues musicians. Respiro un bosque / I Breathe a Forest Tatiana Arocha Through detailed graphic compositions layered with digital and analog techniques, Tatiana Arocha’s Respiro un bosque / I Breathe a Forest immerses viewers in the dense wilderness of South America’s tropical forests. Juxtaposing real specimens, images of rapid devastation, and monumental natural elements, this exhibition powerfully unmasks an anguished cry from the earth and a yearning for nature and its preservation. Through the lens of the bio-political, as well as that of the immigrant longing for her homeland, Arocha reclaims the lands of her native Colombia, using her art to deconstruct and reconstruct endangered natural landscapes that have long since been deforested or decimated. While Arocha’s thoughtful taxonomy alludes to the country’s colonial past, the application of gold paint onto the landscape cleverly references today’s corporate greed and its damage to the environment. Respiro un bosque / I Breathe a Forest is a poignant reminder of the fragility of the ecosystem and the realization that the real treasure of our earth is not in the gold extracted from it or gained by destroying it, but in the forests, the air they produce, and the lives we can only live because of their existence. Respiro un bosque / I Breathe a Forest will transform over several months as the artist continues to adorn the fabric murals with gold. Join us for these live painting sessions and for weekly performances, educational programs, and art-making workshops centered on the themes of nature, the environment, and the places we call home.