Emily Brown

Emily Brown

Growing up in Chester County, Pennsylvania and spending summers in inland midcoast Maine, Emily Brown is deeply affected by the natural landscape, drawing from textures, surfaces, and surfaces found in the wild for her drawings, paintings, and prints.

Other sources for her imagery include beloved toys and the figures of humans and animals in motion photographed in the 1880s by Eadweard Muybridge.  These provide a presence that can be variously humorous, tragic, romantic, or ambiguous.

The artist was raised in a family devoted to medicine and mental health. An active member of a Friends meeting, she finds Quaker discipline and practices a useful part of her daily life and work.

Brown’s  paintings, drawings and prints are included the following collections: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, The James A. Michener Museum, The MacDowell Colony, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Free Library of Philadelphia, The Alex Katz Foundation, Alliance Bernstein in Tokyo, and the United States Embassy, Astana, Kazakhstan. She has been awarded fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, The MacDowell Foundation, LaNapoule Foundation (Cote D’Azur, France,) and Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY.   A Pew Fellow in the Arts for Painting, she has also received a Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and grants from the Leeway Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Independence Foundation.

Brown attended Middlebury College; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania.

She is married to the photographer Will Brown. They have one daughter and two grandsons.

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