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….”

Biography