Melissa Brown has worn cat-eye makeup every day since she was a teenager. I can’t help but associate it with her paintings, where the sacred and profane converge amid mirrored surfaces, shop windows, psychics’ tables, and bedroom altars. The cat-eye flick is dramatic and powerful, dating back to ancient Egypt, where women wore mineral liner for its health properties and as protection against the evil eye.
To connote the layering of our daily experience, Brown collages a spectrum of techniques: photography, plein-air painting, CMYK printing, airbrush, and stencil. Sometimes her paintings come with QR codes that send the viewer to an animation. Her painting “Commute” (2020) shows a hand with long fingers and press-on nails spinning shiny meditation balls in an otherwise empty pandemic-era subway car passing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, a glowing orb of sunlight visible through the window. A painted strobe effect animates the fingers and the reflective balls — a nod to British Vorticist painter Sybil Andrews.
Brown’s studio is on the second floor of a building in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with a busy deli in the storefront and a braiding salon upstairs. The experience of visiting is a bit like walking into one of her paintings, where the mundane and the performative elements of beauty rituals collide through glass shop windows. Last month, we met there to talk about her favorite Renaissance painting, the magic of encountering motifs while walking around the city, finding answers in flotsam, and how paintings can manifest experience.
Melissa Brown was born in 1974 in Morristown, New Jersey, and received her BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Brown also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000. She is currently a professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and co-curated a two-venue group exhibition, Does This Taste Funny? Humor in Contemporary Art, on view at Lehman College Art Gallery and the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College. Brown’s recent solo exhibition, Window Shopping, was presented in New York at Derek Eller Gallery, where she has exhibited since 2017.
Hyperallergic: How did you connect with art as a young person, and what brought you to RISD?
Melissa Brown: I was born in New Jersey, where all of my family is from, but I grew up near Philadelphia. When my parents first moved from New Jersey to Philadelphia, we had an apartment in Center City, near the Ben Franklin Museum. It had recently been updated for the Bicentennial. There was an infinity mirror room with a lot of neon, and an interactive room with phones that you could pick up and listen to someone from history. There was also a glass harmonica. As a child, I was constantly asking to go there and my mom would take me. I even went through a phase where I wanted to be called “Ben Franklin.” We visited his print shop a million times. It must have had an influence.
When it came time to visit colleges, one of them was RISD. I was seduced by it, and that was the determining factor. I went into their Woods-Gerry Gallery and felt it was where I wanted to be.