Vivian E. Browne

#FallenThroughTheCracks – Vivian E. Browne was born on April 26, 1929, in Laurel, Florida. Browne was known for being an activist and professor, and for her political works showcasing her life as a black woman. “Black art is political. If it’s not political, it’s not black art”. Browne worked at Rutgers University in Newark from 1971 to 1992 as a faculty member of the Arts and Sciences department and served as a Fulbright panelist in 1990. 

In 2017, Browne was posthumously included in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, organized by the Brooklyn Museum. In 2018, her work was also shown in Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, an exhibition at Hunter College in NYC. It revisited the 1971 exhibition Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal organized by members of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. 

They protested the Whitney Museum’s refusal to appoint a Black curator for their survey of Contemporary Black Artists. Browne’s work was considered for the exhibition but was ultimately not included. Browne’s work is housed in public and private collections all over the United States. Most notably her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian, Museum Of Modern Art, and the Harry Belafonte & Rosa Parks private collections. According to her mother, Browne died July 23, 1993, at age 64.

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