Heavyweight - #47 Frederick J. Brown

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Maia found a painting in the garbage and took it home. But as it turned out, it wasn’t just any painting. Credits This episode was hosted and produced by senior producer Kalila Holt, along with Jonathan Goldstein. The supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Damiano Marchetti. Special thanks to Sam Reisman, Emily Condon, Alex Blumberg, Lydia Polgreen, Marcy Flynn, Karl McCool, Caitlin Kenney, and Kayla Lattimore. The show was mixed by Bobby Lord.  Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Blue Dot Sessions, Michael Hearst, Sun Shapes, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello? Jonathan. Kalila? Yeah. Is everything okay? Uh-huh. To what do I owe this pleasure? I'm reporting this week's episode.

Yes, that's right. I don't know why I said it was such trepidation in my voice. I am. Yeah, you are. Every episode needs what? You got to have the theme music. Yeah, even before that. Oh, I know what you're getting at.

The cold open. Where you call someone trying to live their life, like your friend Jackie Cohen, and ask them a bunch of stuff that they don't have the time or interest in answering. I see what's going on. The tables have turned. See how you like being called out of the blue, asked a bunch of questions.

I like it. Oh, you like it? Do you like it if I start saying like, what do you like better, lollipops or gum? Why choose? If a rat had a small hat on, would that endear you to it? Oh, definitely. If you were a dog, what do you think your name would be?

Probably the same name, Jonathan Goldstein. Do you remember that time that you referred to George Clooney as the gray-haired doctor from ER? I did. No, I didn't. Yeah, you did. Yes, you did. You were like, who's that gray-haired doctor from ER? And I was like, George Clooney. And you were like, yeah. I guess the thing that we're learning from this is I like being Jackie Cohen. From Gimlet Media, I'm Kalila Holt and this is Heavyweight.

Today's episode, Frederick J. Brown. Right after the break. FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Enjoy the number one feeling, winning,

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and we'd all play Mario Kart. Uh-oh. Let's go. I'm going to do 150 CCs, breaking items, no cams, six races. These Mario Kart sessions started back in the days when we could barely leave the house due to COVID restrictions. So it felt like an escape to log on, to carelessly careen in a small car, or cart, if you will, through a gold mine or off a waterfall. In those dark days,

a few minutes on Mount Wario was the closest thing I could get to a vacation. Ready? Let's be bad. That being said, I also found these Mario Kart hangouts deeply intimidating, because I'm not good at Mario Kart. My gameplay mostly sounds like this. Oh, no. Or this. Oh, no.

Along with the Mario Karting, there was also non-Mario chatting. Oh. I'm sorry. And chatting of any kind is another thing I'm sorry. Happy Bolivia. And chatting of any kind is another thing I'm not good at. Every so often, I'd weigh in with something like, Pretty crazy. This was essentially the extent of my engagement.

Until the night Maya told us about the painting. Maya found the painting sitting in a pile of trash on the sidewalk, and it grabbed her instantly. It was only later, when she took it home, that she saw the artist's signature, Frederick J. Brown. Although Maya works in art,

the name was unfamiliar to her, so she Googled him. And what popped up was a lengthy New York Times obituary from 2012, praising Brown's work and citing Willem de Kooning as an early mentor. Brown, it turned out, was an acclaimed Black artist known for his portraits of jazz and blues musicians. He had work in the Smithsonian. As Maya made her way through his biography, she slowly realized that the painting she'd been so instinctively drawn to was actually the work of an important artist.

And so, Maya was left wondering, how did Brown's painting end up in the trash? Wow, very regal building. On a cold Friday afternoon, I pay Maya a visit at her Brooklyn apartment building to follow up and learn more.

And who knows? Maybe my boyfriend's friend can simply become a friend. Hello. Come on in. Very, like, regal building, I feel like. My IRL chatting is truly no better than my Mario Kart chatting. This is your first time here also. It is, yeah.

What I couldn't see on the small square of our Mario Kart calls was that every surface of Maya's apartment is covered in art. Not only has Maya worked in the art world for many years, at galleries, art publishers, her husband Wes is also an artist himself. He even proposed to Maya on the steps of the Met. There's really only one spot in their apartment that's empty, a blank wall above the couch. They'd been waiting, year after year, for the perfect work of art to hang there. And now, with the discovery of the Frederick J.

Brown painting, they knew they'd found it. Maya says she spotted the painting while heading home from a COVID test. It was gigantic, and she still had a mile to walk. She knew it didn't really make sense to take it with her, but she couldn't walk away from it either. I just kept going back to it. It just was different from all of the other paintings I've seen. It just really kind of grabbed me and I started trying to get it out of the trash. Clutching the huge painting to her body, Maya awkwardly waddled the mile home. There was like a little garbage juice at the bottom and a little dust at the top. When I was walking, I wouldn't let it sit on the ground.

I know I had probably been on the street all day, but I didn't want it to be on the street anymore. It is nearly as long as I am tall, and I'm 5'4". Lots of color and patterns. Despite my fondness for the audio medium, it fails to translate the force of Brown's painting. It's not as easily encapsulated as, say, the Mona Lisa, Smiling Woman,

or American Gothic, Unsmiling Woman, and Man. It's mostly abstract, or American Gothic, unsmiling woman, and man. It's mostly abstract, but then there are these tiny spots with recognizable figures. You can see faces, and there's these horizontal bands that sort of organize the composition. Admiring the painting with Maya

makes me feel like I'm at a fancy party, enjoying hors d'oeuvres, but also panicked that I have nothing intelligent to say. That kind of looks like a seven. The painting feels like a stained glass cabinet full of curios. It feels like a quilt, if a quilt weren't made of fabric,

but of fields and buildings and people rushing to work. It feels like a packed room where everybody's dancing. I ask Maya to show me where she first found the painting, and so we hit the streets to return to the scene of the trash. Should we walk? Yeah, let's walk. We take a walk, as friends often do. Maya tells me the painting was in the trash

with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. A TJ Maxx planter, a stained toy chest. Whoever disposed of it was probably moving. Maybe a neighbor can tell us who might have moved in the last couple months. But whereas I was picturing a small building with just a few buzzers to ring, it turns out the trash heap was actually

in front of a public housing complex, 14 stories high, taking up a whole block. We loiter by the building's entrance, and I try to catch people as they're going in or out. Can I ask you something weird? Can I ask you a weird question? You know anyone who moved out like in December? It's just about a painting that was left outside. A painting? My friend found a painting, and she's trying to figure out, like, what the deal is.

Nobody knows anything. No. All right, thank you. No, thank you. No. All right, thank you. There's a lot I don't understand about art. Like, why are frames so expensive?

But I can tell you this. Paintings, they have two sides. There's the side with all the paint on it, that people are always tripping over each other to talk about. But then, there's the other side. The second, or back side, if you will. Do you want a water or tea or anything? Water would be great.

And back at Maya's apartment, she explains that on this backside, or derriere side, there's another clue. She and Wes were cleaning the painting off, getting it ready to hang on the wall when they saw it. Lightly scrawled on the back of the canvas

was an inscription. Painted 1979, December. Title, Genesis II, Love, Happy Birthday. From Frederick to Lowry Sims, and then he signed it and dated it 1979. Maya may not have known the name Frederick Brown, but she knew the name Lowry Sims quite well. Lowry was the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and before that, she'd been the first Black curator

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She's now in her 70s and has had decades of impact on the art world. She's reached living legend status. You can't help but be like, oh, okay, yeah, should I have not used a paper towel to clean this? The way Maya sees it,

if you find something with someone else's name on it, whether that's a wallet, a cat, or a painting, you try to give it back to them. And so she wants to return the painting to its rightful owner, Lowry Sims. And once we find her, maybe Lowry can help piece together how the painting ended up in the garbage.

I would, like, love to help try and get in touch with this person. Yes, please. My garbage hunting, an abject failure. But my people hunting, that's going to be an abject success. I can't find an email address for Lowry, so I do what we all do when we want to pester someone more important than we are.

I send a message on LinkedIn. I explain that I have a painting I think belongs to her, but perhaps fearing I'm running some sort of con where I trade paintings for social security numbers, Lowry doesn't respond. Hi, how are you? I need some sort of inroad, so I contact an artist named Chloe Bass, who's worked with Lowry. I don't know why she would even need LinkedIn. Like, that's how, like, her career is very well established. Chloe's also confused by how the painting ended up in the trash. She says Lowry can't have been the one to throw it away,

because Lowry doesn't live in Brooklyn and never has. Chloe agrees to reach out to her on my behalf. And now that the request isn't coming from a rando on LinkedIn, but a rando who knows Chloe Bass, Lowry responds. We have a few back and forths over email. I'm hoping to schedule a time for us to talk on the phone, but Lowry is reluctant. She tells me she doesn't want to talk unless she can see a photo of the painting first. So I send her a photo, saying I'd be curious if she recognizes Genesis 2, and equally curious if she doesn't. Who knows,

maybe Brown's gift of the painting never even reached her. The next morning, Lowry writes back, quote, intriguing, period. That is the extent of her email. And and after that our correspondence comes to a halt We'll be right back. Winning in an exciting live dealer studio exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Intriguing, period. What did Lowry Sims' email mean?

It's not the response you'd expect of someone recognizing a beloved long-lost painting. I start to wonder if maybe the painting's a fake. Genesis 2 doesn't look like any of the other Frederick Brown paintings I've seen online. Maybe Lowry's intriguing means an intriguing forgery. So I contact Frederick Brown's trust. I figure they'll know best

if the painting's really his. And five days later, I get confirmation that the painting is legit. I receive a call from a man named Bentley, who teaches at Fordham and is a PhD candidate

at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Bentley is also, it turns out, Frederick J. Brown's son. So here's the backstory. Yeah. The painting is part of a larger painting called Genesis. Okay. That's in the collection of the Met. Oh, whoa. I didn't know that. So my dad became the youngest artist to be in the collection of the Met at that time. Like at 33. Jeez. Let's see, let me think about that. Actually, 34. Okay. And on top of that, right, as a Black artist

as well, right? So this is a big deal. So part one is at the Met. Part one, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part two, in a trash heap on a Brooklyn sidewalk. on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Bentley can't wait to see his father's painting in person,

so he makes the drive from the Bronx to Maya's apartment in Brooklyn. Hi. I'm Maya. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you in person.

And I'm hoping maybe Bentley will have insight into how his dad's painting ended up in the trash. Should we look at this painting and then maybe we can talk? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, I'd love to. We all file into the living room, where Maya and her husband Wes have propped the painting up against a wall for Bentley to look at.

Bentley takes it in. This is amazing. It's just like, this makes me so happy. Is this your first time seeing this painting? Yeah, I've never seen this. Bentley's dedicated

years of his life to his father's work, but he can't tell me how the painting ended up in the trash. Before I reached out, he hadn't even known Genesis 2 existed.

He bends down to get a closer look. You didn't just stumble upon any piece within his catalog, you stumbled upon an extremely important piece. It turns out that Genesis 2 was painted at the moment when Brown was making a transition. That's why it looks so different than anything else I'd seen online. Brown was moving away from abstraction and towards more figurative work.

So among the shapes and lines, you see faces, an airplane, and... The fox figure. Oh, cool. And it's like a self-portrait. Do you know why your dad chose a fox as a symbol of representation? Yeah, that's a good question.

You have to be a fox to survive in the art world as a Black man. Have to be. Everybody looks at the fox as like a nefarious sort of character, right? But my dad kind of looked at it as like, nah, that's just a cat who has to do whatever it has to do to survive. Bentley tells us about his dad's life, about Frederick Brown's childhood on the south side of Chicago, how Brown's dad managed a juke joint,

hanging around blues musicians like Muddy Waters. Early on, color made a strong impression on Brown. He grew up mixing paint for the luxury cars his uncle worked on. Later, Brown found work in the steel mills, the colors of the hot metal burning their way into his mind. Because he'd always talk about how like bright orange the ingots were. You can see the bright orange in there. Brown attended college in Illinois and eventually moved to New York, where he set up shop in a huge loft on Worcester Street in Soho. Other artists and musicians were always stopping by.

Romare Bearden, B.B. King, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. The Worcester Street loft is where Brown painted Genesis. So then after that, he signed with Marlboro Gallery. And so that was a big deal, because Marlboro Gallery was the hottest gallery at that time. We talk about Basquiat being the first Black artist to sort of make that break. It was really my dad, like, I'm not even going to hold you. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you know? But while Basquiat went on to become a household name, selling paintings for millions of dollars,

Frederick J. Brown did not. So what happened? It turns out that even after signing with Marlboro, Brown wasn't being shown in the way he thought he should be. My dad kept trying to get like a retrospective and he couldn't get a retrospective anywhere. So Brown took matters into his own hands when a Taiwanese artist named CJ Yao invited him to come to China. artist named C.J. Yao invited him to come to China. It was 1988, and communist China was just starting to culturally open up. Only one other American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, had shown work in the country. But together, Brown and Yao decided, let's do a Frederick J. Brown retrospective in China. And they decided to do it

in the National Museum of China, which is on Tiananmen Square. And it's an insanely huge building. The museum had been filled with relics of Chairman Mao and the Communist Revolution. But all that was cleared out to make room for 100 Frederick J. Brown paintings. And he had 60,000 people a day.

Wow. For like 30 days. Wow. He had to go to China to have a, he had to go to China to be seen as an American artist. Because in America, Brown was seen as a Black artist. And despite what he accomplished in China, when he returned to the States, he hadn't earned any additional prestige.

Instead, Marlboro was pissed that he did the show because they did it without their consent. He took out a loan to do it himself of half a million dollars. He had no way of paying it back.

So that was like the beginning of, I don't want to say the end, but it was the beginning of like a real hardship. Marlborough dropped him. The bank was trying to take all his work, which he'd put up as collateral. He was only able to save some paintings by erasing his name entirely

so the bank would think they weren't his. Other paintings he hid in the walls of his Worcester Street loft. Brown continued to paint for the rest of his life, but he never regained that blue-trip cachet from his early career. He didn't become a name that a non-art person like me, or even an art person like Maya,

would immediately recognize. Brown died of cancer in 2012, and 10 years later, Bentley's frustrated that his father still doesn't have his rightful place in the canon. You go up to these people that are gatekeepers, and you plead your case. Most people are just like, eh, whatever. There's not a market for it right now. Right? And it's like, it's like, man, fuck you. It's the same story for a lot of Black artists. Sure, these gatekeepers want Black art, Bentley says,

but they want a particular kind of Black art. They want art they can look at and go, ah, yes, I get it. This is about the politics of being black in America. When we think about black art or black artists, right, we are very quick to add like a political tag to the thing. I mean, I guess you could argue that blackness in and of itself is a political thing. But my dad was kind of much more of the camp of like, just like make art for art's sake.

But purely aesthetic work by a Black artist, that's what ends up in the garbage. It's such a painful feeling. It's such a, yeah, painful is the word. It's such a painful feeling when you know that like you have such a special world and people don't give a shit. What is, I mean, like, if you have to describe, like, what that special world was, like, how would you explain it? Bentley points at the painting, still leaning against the wall. It's that right there. So much color.

So much emotion. So much beauty. You two recognized it. The painting definitely called to me. Yeah, I mean, you rescued it, right? And it's like a piece of my dad. It's like his energy, his spirit. It's him, you know?

That was just my dad calling out to you. That's what that was. Being like, yo, don't let me go in the trash, yo. My son lives not too far away. Don't let me go in the trash. While Bentley was able to trace the path that led Frederick Brown's work to the metaphorical trash heap, I'm still wondering about the literal trash heap, the one on a Brooklyn sidewalk.

And so, of course, I'm still wondering about Lowry Sims. It turns out Bentley knows Lowry well. The two are even writing a book together. When I ask Bentley about Lowry's aversion to speaking with me, he alludes to some bad experiences she's had with journalists, but he reassures me that he'll put in a good word. And the next morning, Bentley calls to tell me that Lowry is willing to talk. There's just one caveat. She doesn't want to discuss how the painting wound up in the garbage. It's hard for

me to figure out why, and I don't really know how to do an interview about a painting that ended up in the trash without asking how the painting ended up in the trash. So I cross my fingers that something might shift once we're on the phone. Larry takes my call from her condo in Baltimore. She tells me that she met Frederick Brown when she was around 30, a newly minted curator at the Met. As a curator, Lowry's mission was to champion the work of overlooked artists. Lowry herself knew what it was like to be overlooked. I mean, I was in, you know, as a Black girl from Queens.

I had a career nobody would have expected at that time. I was in places where nobody expected at the time. I mean, I used to tell people one of the most amusing things for me was to go to a collector on Park Avenue in the 70s and get to the front door and the doorman would try to sort of scoop me around to the service entrance because they assumed I was a housekeeper or something, you know, and no, I'm, you know, a citizen from the Metropolitan Museum. You sort of see the face change, you know, they go, oh, get on. You sort of see the face change, you know.

They go, oh, get off. It was a struggle to get past the ignorance about Black artists. Like once in the 70s, Lowry organized an exhibit of Black art from the Met's collection. And when we got the exhibition up, I was approached by a journalist who said, I didn't even know there were Black artists. Now, this is like 1979. Come on. Oh, geez. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I said, well, we've been around since the late 1800s. Hearing this story, it starts to make sense why Lowry might have been reluctant to speak with me, a white-looking journalist she's never met. In fact, when I spoke with Bentley, he said Lowry had wanted him to suss me out, to make sure that I was okay before she agreed to talk to me. Like his dad, Bentley said,

Lowry too has had to be a fox. Lowry and Brown's friendship endured for decades, starting in that Worcester street loft and lasting until Brown's death. And even after he died, Lowry continued to engage with Brown's work. Just last summer, she helped put together a big posthumous show of his art at the Barry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan.

Like Bentley, she wants Brown to finally get his due. It's original work. You know, it's strong work. I'm just hopeful that, you know, Frederick gets written into the, you know, the art lexicon in the way that he needs to be. When I ask Lowry why this hasn't happened yet,

like Bentley, she cites the aftermath of the China trip. But she also offers this. And it's true. In the 90s, Brown left New York for a town called Carefree, Arizona. A big factor in that decision was his daughter's asthma. Brown knew the dry desert heat would be good for her. And although money was still tight, the family was happy out in Arizona. Bentley recalls his dad attending his flag football games

in his signature white Brooks Brothers suit, sweating in the Arizona sun and dabbing his forehead with napkins. While some children of famous artists remember locked studio doors, sweating in the Arizona sun and dabbing his forehead with napkins. While some children of famous artists remember locked studio doors, Bentley remembers his dad's welcoming studio couch, where he'd flop down after school and talk about his day while his father painted. All of which is to say,

Bentley remembers Brown as a good dad. As Lowry and I talk, I do my best to avoid the whole painting in the trash thing. So we discuss her time at the Met, Brown's jazz portraits, the similarities between Genesis 1 and 2. But then, without prompting, Lowry volunteers this. I mean, I sort of like, you know, kind of figured out that I probably gave the painting to someone who admired it. You know, I can't remember who because, you know, because it was certainly too big for my little apartment. As it turns out, Brown had painted Lowry Genesis 2 as a thank you gift because she'd been the curator who bought Genesis 1 for the Met's collection. But the painting was huge, and Lowry ran into the problem that so many New Yorkers do. Living in a cramped apartment on the Upper East Side, she just hadn't had space for it. For Lowry, there was no blank wall above the couch, just waiting for something

to be hung. So instead, she found Genesis 2 a good home with a friend who loved it. And I think I told Fred, you know, like about that. Yeah. How it ended up where Maya found it, I don't know. I just can't remember who I might have given it to. I suspect that Lowry might be trying to protect a friend. Maybe that's why she'd been reluctant to talk about the painting's loss. Maybe Lowry gave the painting to someone who moved to a smaller apartment themselves.

Or maybe they died or fell on hard times and decided to sell it. Maybe it was regifted to someone else or sold in an estate sale or just lost in the general shuffle of life. No matter what, the end result is the same. Ultimately, someone looked at it, thought, this isn't worth keeping, and threw it away. All of that, it seems,

was wrapped up in Lowry's intriguing. Does it make you sad at all to think of art just in the trash like that? Well, you know, there's a saying that 98% of all the art created in the world since the beginning is gone. Do you think, like, the best stuff somehow makes it through? Do you know what I mean?

I think it's totally random. I mean, I guess that's why we have museums, you know, because they can be seen as places where these things can be saved. But I mean, just look at what's happening now in the Ukraine. You know, they're bombing museums and cultural sites. So I think

a lot of times it's just the luck of the draw. Time is the most capricious of curators. A few weeks earlier, when Bentley came by Maya's apartment, we all sat around and talked for hours about art and family. And finally, when it was time to go, Maya turned to Bentley and said,

I don't think the painting belongs with me. I think it belongs somewhere else. Bentley's taller than Maya and had no problem lifting up the canvas. He thanked Maya warmly and carried Genesis 2 out the door to his car. He'd serve as the painting's caretaker until Lowry decided what she wanted to do. Can you tell me sort of like what's happening to it now?

Do you know where it's going? Yeah, it's been accepted by the Studio Museum as a donation. Oh, that's great. And the donation will be from me, from the estate of the artist, and from Maya. On a warm Friday afternoon, I pay Maya a visit at her Regal apartment building. Hello.

She and Wes are signing the paperwork to officially donate the painting to the Studio Museum, and I'm here to serve as a witness. Lowry and Bentley have both already signed. You'll try and get some of that pen sound. Knowing how much Maya loves the painting, I thought giving it up would be bittersweet. But she's in high spirits.

She likes the idea of Genesis II hanging in a museum. That way, thousands of people will get to enjoy it. We'll lean towards the plaque and read the name Frederick J. Brown. Who knows what that name might mean to people in the future, if time will strengthen Brown's legacy or wash it away. But for now, we finish up the paperwork

and all cheers a shot of tequila to celebrate, as friends often do. Thank you so much, Tequila. Thank you. On my way out, I noticed that the big wall above Maya's couch is still blank. Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home

Now that the last month's rent is scheming With the damage deposit Take this moment to decide If we meant it, if we tried Or felt around for far too much From things that accidentally touch This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me, Kalila Holt, along with Jonathan Goldstein. Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane.

Production help from Damiano Marchetti. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Lydia Polgreen, Marcy Flynn, Carl McCool, Caitlin Kenney, and Kayla Lattimore. With extra special thanks to Sam Reisman. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Michael Hurst, and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website, Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans,

courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com. We'll be back next week.