In 1997 a retrospective exhibition, Transformation: The Art of Joan Brown was jointly assembled by the Berkeley art Museum and the Oakland Museum, producing a comprehensive catalog of her work. Karen Tsujimoto, exhibition curator, wrote of Brown’s use of models: “Dressing them up – and sometimes down - in jauntily patterned clothes and often situating them in fanciful scenarios with animals like aardvarks and rats, brown created her own grown-up versions of paper dolls to suit her whimsical fantasies….”

A survey of her paintings and works on paper will be exhibited at The San Jose Museum of Art. The exhibition entitled, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown will be on display October 14, 2023 - March 11, 2023

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