SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — African American artists are producing some of the most compelling art today, making abstractions or depicting the country’s troubles and triumphs in paintings, installations, video, sculpture, photography and more, with astonishing beauty and power.
Think of Kehinde Wiley’s widely reproduced official presidential portrait of Barack Obama seated amid lush greenery, for example, or Amy Sherald’s stunning official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, brushed in muted tones of gray.
Such works are part of an artistic tradition Greater Clevelanders have had ample opportunity to appreciate starting as far back as four decades ago.
That’s because the Malcolm Brown Gallery in Shaker Heights, in operation from 1980 to 2011, functioned as a rare and special place away from the coasts where viewers could keep up with national currents in African American art — and, importantly, to buy that art.
The business was the brainchild of art dealer and educator Ernestine Brown, and her late husband, painter and art educator Malcolm Brown, the gallery’s namesake.
PDHST PLAIN DEALER HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION Malcolm Brown Gallery, Malcolm and Ernestine Brown ************** 1986 Press Photo Artist Malcolm Brown and Ernestine Brown at Malcom's Gallery Cleveland Plain DealerCleveland Plain Dealer
Brown, who died Oct. 1 at age 89 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease at the Wilensky Memory Care unit at Montefiore in Beachwood, was an artist, a teacher, a gallery co-founder and a man who made an enormous contribution to culture.
Located in a one-story brick storefront at the southeast corner of Chagrin Boulevard and Lomond Boulevard, the gallery that bore his name showed the works of important artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Carolyn Mazloomi, Hughie Lee-Smith, Moe Brooker, Selma Burke, and many others.
Looking back on that record, it’s astonishing to think about what the Browns accomplished. They brought museum-quality work by African American artists to our region at a time when few galleries in New York and other big cities focused on such work.
Avant-garde
The Browns were decades ahead of the Cleveland Museum of Art, which caught up over the past dozen years or so with exhibitions on modern and contemporary African American artists including Kerry James Marshall, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, and William H. Johnson.
Acting as if their gallery were a museum in itself, the Browns brought their artists to Cleveland for lectures, classes and other public events that enabled art lovers to meet, mingle with, and learn directly from some of America’s greatest practitioners.
It was at the gallery, for example, that I met and interviewed Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999), a native of Eustis, Florida, who grew up in Cleveland and attended classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art.
PDHST PLAIN DEALER HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION Hughie Lee-Smith at Malcolm Brown Gallery ************** 1984 Press Photo Hughie Lee-Smith at Malcolm Brown Gallery Cleveland Plain DealerCleveland Plain Dealer
“As a child growing up on E. 105th St. in Cleveland during the Depression,” I wrote, Lee-Smith “knew he wanted to be an artist. But as a working class black student, he had no role models to emulate.”
Lee-Smith, living in New York at the time of his visit, said: “You just had to strike out on your own. The very idea of being an artist was ludicrous to most black people. But I was so involved in creative work that I had the guts, and I kept at it. I felt I had something to say.”
Around him in the gallery were Smith’s images of isolated Black figures standing against austere brick walls and blue bodies of water resembling Lake Erie. They were searing and poignant depictions of alienation and loneliness, delivered with a dash of surrealism and melancholic whimsy.
And that was just a taste of what the Browns offered me and others interested in art by African Americans while managing to keep their business alive for 31 years as a for-profit enterprise.
A first
In fact, Chicago artist Rhonda Brown, 51, one of Brown’s three surviving children, said in an interview last week that her research has shown that the Malcolm Brown Gallery was America’s first Black-owned, for-profit gallery devoted to African American art.
"That’s something, that’s something,'' she marveled.
Helen Forbes Fields, a trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Art, said her experiences at the Malcolm Brown gallery turned her into a collector of African American art.
"They were bringing the top known national artists to Cleveland,'' she said. “They were educating everyone in this community and beyond.”
In addition to holding regular exhibitions of work by some of the country’s greatest Black artists, the gallery showed works by Brown himself, a quiet, man whose artistic accomplishments merit continued appreciation.
Brown is perhaps best remembered in Shaker Heights as an art teacher who shared his insights with generations of students from 1974 to 2010 in the Woodbury School and later at Shaker Heights High.
Rhonda Brown said that following her father’s death, she was “blown away” by comments about him that she received via social media.
She said one former student wrote that “in all my other classes I was troublesome. He [Brown] kind of let me be who I was and he was never mean or punitive. He would help you be your best self.”
Artistic legacy
In the future, Brown’s art will live on, providing opportunities to raise awareness of his personal achievements, and what drove him to create.
Brown said her family, including her mother, who also survives, but who was unable to give an interview, has preserved, catalogued and photographed hundreds of paintings by her father. The family doesn’t yet have plans for a retrospective exhibition, but it’s a topic of discussion.
"We’re working it through,'' she said. “We’re not in a rush.”
She said she remembers her father as someone who said little but who spoke most eloquently with his brush.
"I just loved sitting and watching my dad paint,'' she said. “I did that for hours and hours and hours. I would watch him create things — something from nothing.”
Her father worked in acrylics, mostly, but also augmented his brightly colored landscapes and portraits with touches of pastel.
His favorite subjects included scenes he photographed while on vacation with his wife in locales including sunny Caribbean streets and open-air markets on St. Maarten, St. Barts and Jamaica.
He carried a sketchbook and camera, taking photographs he later used to generate finished paintings in his studio.
Rock House View, artist Malcolm Brown, acrylic, 18 x 24 inches. BIG FILE RUN ANY SIZE Received in email for Steve Litt from: Ernestine T. Brown Malcolm Brown Gallery 20100 Chagrin Blvd. Shaker Heights, OH 44122 216.751.2955 The Plain DealerThe Plain Dealer
"Rock House View,'' an undated landscape exhibited at the gallery in the 2000s depicts a leafy backyard with a broken down house and fence overgrown by foliage depicted with a light, lively touch.
“Women at the Market,” another undated acrylic shown in the 2000s, presents a utopian vision of a sunny, everyday scene in which women and girls converse in a pool of shade cast by a tent-like canopy.
Brown’s paintings radiate a gentle, inner contentment, a sense of abundance and an unabashed interest in sheer visual pleasure.
That’s true of "Groovin,' '' a Brown painting in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, depicting three saxophone players in phosphorescent shades of orange, turquoise and violet. The museum said it would put the work on view this week in Brown’s memory.
Malcolm Brown's "Groovin' '' is on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art in a posthumous tribute to the artist.Cleveland Museum of Art
Rhonda said she has vivid memories of her father’s sensitivity to color, and how he seemed to speak through his art, rather than through conversation.
"Every time he finished a painting, I would clean his porcelain paint palette,'' she said. “It created these wonderful colors. I would stare at them and peel them apart. We didn’t exchange a lot of conservation. He was not a talker. He was just always there. Some dads are not there.”
An artist’s roots
Born in 1931 in Charlottesville, Va., Brown grew up in the nearby Freetown, a community formed by freed slaves in the early 19th century that still exists and where Richard Brown, a first cousin of Malcolm’s, still lives, and where other cousins live nearby.
Malcolm Brown, right, with his maternal grandfather, Jesse Jackson, and brother, Milton Brown, in an undated photo from the 1930s.Courtesy Rhonda Brown
Other survivors include Brown’s brothers: Malcolm T. Brown, (Vanessa) of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Jeffrey Brown, Los Angeles; and two nephews.
It was in Virginia, Rhonda Brown believes, that her father formed his character as a quiet, gentle man in a form of adaptation to white-dominated Southern society.
"My dad grew up in an era where it behooved you if you were a tall Black man growing up in the South, it behooved you to have this gentle way about you,'' she said. “In many cases, it could save your life. What’s sad is that’s still the case in 2020.”
Academically gifted, Brown earned a bachelor of science in fine arts education at Virginia State University, where he was a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, and later completed a master’s degree in arts education at Case Western Reserve University.
After participating in ROTC as an undergraduate, Brown turned a stint in the U.S. Army in 1956-58, during which he was stationed at Hanover Germany, into an unofficial artistic Fulbright fellowship. He visited museums, galleries and churches, feeding his eye with masterpieces of European art.
During a summer break from teaching at the Carter G. Woodson School in Hopewell, VA., Brown took a summer class at Boston University, where he met Ernestine Turner. They married a half-year later, in 1964.
"It’s hard to talk about Malcom without talking about Ernestine,'' Forbes Fields said. "It’s about this wonderful marriage and partnership they had,'' she said.
Together, the Browns brought the best African American artists of their time to Cleveland, creating a rare and unique form of artistic access.
As their daughter said: "They weren’t in it for anything other than the glory of creating space for artists to flourish and grow and be recognized for what they were doing.''
Note: Donations may be made in Malcolm Brown’s memory to the Malcolm Brown Legacy Fund for Visual Arts at the Cleveland Foundation. Information is available at the foundation’s website, clevelandfoundation.org.
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