James Brown (October 26, 1951-February 22, 2020) took on several styles over the years, but his work maintains a hand-made look combining concerns of the modernist tradition with motifs and spiritual interests from tribal art. Much of his work is non-realistic but contains depictions or signs of recognizable faces or objects playing with the line between representation and abstraction. Besides paintings, Brown has also produced sculptures and started to heavily utilize collage in the 1990’s. In an Artforum review of a 25 year retrospective, Martha Schwendener noted “The works range from abstract gouaches to biomorphic and figurative watercolors to collages that update the synthetic Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque”. The artist was active in Paris, France and Oaxaca, Mexico. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.