2026 Update: Frederick J. Brown

0:06Pushkin.

0:11Hi. Hello. Today we're going to revisit an episode that I reported. It's called Frederick J. Brown. Oh, yeah. Okay. It's about art. It's about a painting. Amazing. I love art. You know that, right? Yeah, you're always talking about how much you love art. Is that true? No. Oh, I don't want to become one of those art boars. Are we talking about like fine art? I thought we were talking about fine art, yeah. There's all kinds of different art. Well, sure, this is art in a way. This conversation we're having right now. Well, let's not get crazy. I feel like a real dilettante around art, but I do like it.

0:50You like it. You wouldn't say you love it. I just don't know that I'm knowledgeable enough. You don't have to be. Okay. Then I guess I love it. Who do you think loves it more, me or you? Probably you. Really? Maybe just because of, this is going to sound rude, but your added years of experience. Sure, I've had a lot of time in the game of ogling art. You know, you might be surprised to learn that a person like myself, I'm not much of an art snob in the sense that I believe that everybody possesses artistic and creative ability. Wow, that's beautiful. Now I'm off my high horse. I'm going to get on my low horse, my show pony.

1:33Okay. And away we go. Away we go. Do you know whose catchphrase that was? No. A pilot? Jackie Gleason. Oh, all right. Well, away we go indeed. Oh, but first, a word from our sponsors. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. What if your soda actually did something for you? Introducing Sky Pop Protein Soda. Sky Pop Protein Soda has 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and real delicious soda taste. Sky Pop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Sky Pop protein soda now at Target, Walmart, or Kroger. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. For a limited time, when you get a new Apple Card and purchase AirPods Pro 3 at Apple, you can earn back the cost up to$250 daily cash.

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3:18Mario Kart! Hey!

3:24Every 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 Kart. Oh, uh, this guy? I'm going to do 150cc, spread the guy, there's no calm, 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 careen in a small car, or cart, if you will, through a gold mine or off a waterfall. In those dark days, a few minutes on Mount Wario was the closest thing I could get to a vacation. Ready? Let's be back. That being said, I also found these Mario Kart hangouts deeply intimidating, because I'm not good at Mario Kart.

4:11My gameplay mostly sounds like this. Oh, no. Or this. Oh, no. Along with the Mario Karting, there was also non-Mario chatting. Oh, great. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Happy birthday, Brinkley. 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 the artist's signature, Frederick J. Brown.

4:57Although Maya works in art, the name was unfamiliar to her, so she googled him. And what popped up was a lengthy New York Times obituary from 2012, praising Brown's work and citing Willem de Kooning as an early mentor. Brown, it turned out, was an acclaimed Black artist, known for his portraits of jazz and blues musicians. He had work in the Smithsonian. As Maya made her way through his biography, she slowly realized that the painting she'd been so instinctively drawn to was actually the work of an important artist. And so, Maya was left wondering, how did Brown's painting end up in the trash?

5:42Wow, a very regal building. On a cold Friday afternoon, I pay Maya a visit at her Brooklyn apartment building to follow up and learn more. And who knows? Maybe my boyfriend's friend can simply become a friend.

6:01Hello. Come on in. Very, like, regal building, I feel like. My IRL chatting is truly no better than my Mario Kart chatting. This is your first time here also. 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 blank wall above the couch. They'd been waiting, year after year, for the perfect work of art to hang there.

6:44And now, with the discovery of the Frederick J. Brown painting, they knew they'd found it. Maya says she spotted the painting while heading home from a COVID test. It was gigantic, and she still had a mile to walk. She knew it didn't really make sense to take it with her. But she couldn't walk away from it either. 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, Maya awkwardly waddled the mile home. There was like a little garbage juice at the bottom and a little dust at the top.

7:29When 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.

7:44It is nearly as long as I am tall and I'm 5 '4". 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 Maya makes me feel like I'm at a fancy party, enjoying hors d 'oeuvres, but also panicked that I have nothing intelligent to say.

8:29That kind of looks 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 of fields and buildings and people rushing to work. It feels like a packed room where everybody's dancing. I ask Maya to show me where she first found the painting, And so we hit the streets to return to the scene of the trash. Should we walk? Yeah, let's walk. We take a walk, as friends often do.

9:04Maya tells me the painting was in the trash with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. A TJ Maxx planter, a stained toy chest. Whoever disposed of it was probably moving. Maybe a neighbor can tell us who might have moved in the last couple months. But whereas I was picturing a small building with just a few buzzers to ring, it turns out the trash heap was actually in front of a public housing complex, 14 stories high, taking up a whole block.

9:36We loiter by the building's entrance, and I try to catch people as they're going in or out. Can I ask you something weird? Can I ask you a weird question? You know anyone who moved out, like, in December? It's just about a painting that was left outside. A painting. My friend found a painting, and she's trying to figure out, like, what the deal is. Nobody knows anything. No. All right, thank you. No, thank you. No. All right, thank you.

10:05There's a lot I don't understand about art. Like, why are frames so expensive? But I can tell you this. Paintings, they have two sides. There's the side with all the paint on it that people are always tripping over each other to talk about. But then there's the other side, the second or back side, if you will. Do you want a water or tea or anything? Water would be great. And back at Maya's apartment, she explains that on this back side or derriere side, there's another clue. She and Wes were cleaning the painting off, getting it ready to hang on the wall when they saw it. Lightly scrawled on the back of the canvas, was an inscription.

10:45Painted 1979, December. Title, Genesis 2, Love, Happy Birthday, from Frederick to Lowry Sims, and then he signed it and dated it in 1979.

11:04Maya may not have known the name Frederick Brown, but she knew the name Lowry Sims quite well. Lowry 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 70s and has had decades 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 Sims.

11:49And 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.

12:14I 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.

12:38Hi, how are you? I need some sort of inroad, So I contact an artist named Chloe Bass, who's worked with Lowry. I don't know why she would even need LinkedIn. Like, that's how, like, her career is very well established. Chloe's 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 Arando on LinkedIn, but Arando who knows Chloe Bass, Lowry responds. We have a few back and forths over email. I'm hoping to schedule a time for us to talk on the phone, but Lowry is reluctant.

13:20She tells me she doesn't want to talk unless she can see a photo of the painting first. So I send her a photo, saying I'd be curious if she recognizes Genesis 2, and equally curious if she doesn't. Who knows, maybe Brown's gift of the painting never even reached her. The next morning, Lowry writes back, quote, quote, intriguing, period. That is the extent of her email. And after that, our correspondence comes to a halt.

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15:31Intriguing. Period. What did Lowry Sims' email mean? It's not the response you'd expect of someone recognizing a beloved long-lost painting. I start to wonder if maybe the painting's a fake. Genesis 2 doesn't look like any of the other Frederick Brown paintings I've seen online. Maybe Lowry's intriguing means an intriguing forgery. So I contact Frederick Brown's trust. I figure they'll know best if the painting's really his. And five days later, I get confirmation that the painting is legit. I receive a call from a man named Bentley, who teaches at Fordham and is a PhD candidate at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts.

16:12Bentley is also, it turns out, Frederick J. Brown's son. So here's the backstory. 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 got 33. Jeez. Let's see, let me think about that. Actually, 34. Okay. And, like, on top of that, right, as a Black artist as well, right? So this is a big 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.

17:00Bentley 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. Hi. I'm Maya. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you in person. 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? Yeah, I'd love to. We all file into the living room, where Maya and her husband Wes have propped the painting up against a wall for Bentley to look at. Bentley takes it in.

17:35This is amazing.

17:39This makes me so happy. Is this your first time seeing this painting? 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 2 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 that Genesis 2 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.

18:22So 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 a 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 a nefarious sort of character, right? But my dad kind of looked at it as like, nah, that's just a cat who has to do whatever it has to do to survive.

18:58Bentley tells us about his dad's life, about Frederick Brown's childhood on the south side of Chicago, how Brown's dad managed a 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. He'd always talk about how 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 in Soho.

19:36Other artists and musicians were always stopping by. Romare Bearden, B.B. King, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. The Worcester 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 Basquiat being the first Black artist to sort of make that break. But it was really my dad. I'm not even going to hold you. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you know? But while Basquiat went on to become a household name, selling paintings for millions of dollars, Frederick J. Brown did not.

20:15So what happened? It turns out that even after signing with Marlboro, 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 1988, 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.

20:56And they decided to do it in the National Museum of China, which, like, is on Tiananmen Square. And it's, like, an insanely huge building. The museum had been filled with relics of Chairman Mao and the Communist Revolution. But all that was cleared out to make room for 100 Frederick J. Brown paintings. And he had a lot, I mean, he had 60 ,000 people a day. Wow. For, like, 30 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.

21:41Instead, Marlboro was pissed that he did the show because they did it 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.

22:25Brown 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 Maya, would immediately recognize. Brown died of cancer in 2012, and 10 years later, Bentley's frustrated that his father still doesn't have his rightful place in the canon. You go up to these people that are gatekeepers, and you plead your case. Most people are just like, eh, 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.

23:07Sure, 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.