Within the last decade, an influential generation of Black American women artists who came of age in the 1960s has received long overdue recognition in major museums across the United States. Retrospectives of Betye Saar (2015), Howardena Pindell (2018), Emma Amos (2021), Faith Ringgold (2022), and Elizabeth Catlett (2024), as well as the groundbreaking show We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), have brought scholarly and popular attention to a cohort of artists whose legacy endures in modern and contemporary art of the US. The spotlight on this generation continues to shine with Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest at the Phillips Collection, the first major museum retrospective of her work since a mid-career survey at the Bronx Museum in 1985. Co-organized with the Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Cincinnati, and cocurated by Amara Antilla and Adrienne L. Childs, the exhibition features sixty-two objects from Browne’s prolific four-decade career, including paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. The curators expertly integrated contextualizing information throughout, including wall texts, archival materials, an illustrated timeline, and a video of the artist discussing her work.

The exhibition’s catalog includes gorgeous reproductions, new scholarship from the curators and art historian Darby English, a reprinted 1988 review by Lowery Stokes Sims, and two artist statements. The essays by Childs and English are particularly noteworthy for contending with Browne’s ability to stay true to her vision despite both indifference from a white male-dominated art world and stringent expectations from peers in the Black artist community. Though she was a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) and active in other influential antiracist and feminist art collectives, Browne always refused to adhere to any external mandates regarding the kind of art she should make. The phrase “my kind of protest” originates from an interview in which she discussed challenges she faced as a Black woman artist in the 1960s: “During the Civil Rights Era, one had to paint black themes, black people, black ideas. I didn’t . . . I was painting my kind of protest, but it didn’t look like black art . . . Then, I was painting these little old white men” (“Vivian Browne, Painter, Printmaker, March 10, 1985, Interview between Vivian Browne and Emma Amos,” Artist and Influence, eds Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch, 9),

Here, Browne is referring to her first major series, Little Men, which greeted viewers on entering the exhibition. Created between 1966 and 1969 and inspired by the many insufferable white men she knew from her job with the New York Department of Education, Little Men consists of over two hundred oil paintings on paper and eight on canvas, all featuring ridiculous caricatures of middle-aged (mostly) white men. Their loose, expressionistic style and jarring color recall Willem de Kooning’s abstract expressionist paintings of women from the early 1950s. Unlike de Kooning’s women, however, Browne’s Little Men advances a searing critique of white male supremacy through painting after painting of feckless bureaucrats and portly Wall Street executives who grimace, groan, and stare vacuously into space. The Phillips displayed nine works on paper and four on canvas, including the largest, Seven Deadly Sins. In this multi-figured tableau of toxic masculinity, overfed men in corporate shirts and ties make empty gestures of pompous victory or juvenile resistance. Seeing this painting in person for the first time, I was struck by Browne’s ability to harness the emotive aspects of color and exuberant brushwork to draw viewers in, no matter how repellent her subject.

Before creating Little Men, Browne was developing a body of work based on people she encountered while living and working in New York. The resulting New Yorkers series appeared in the gallery following Little Men. Focusing on the poses and gestures of individuals or groups, Browne often left the backgrounds of these paintings blank or activated the space with loosely brushed, vibrant color. Even when she depicts the Manhattan skyline in the most dynamic example displayed, the viewer is captivated above all by the strong color contrasts of the central figure—especially the contrast between the yellow-green of their right arm and bright orange-red of their right leg—which call to mind Henri Matisse’s fauvist portrait of Madame Matisse (The Green Stripe) or Vincent Van Gogh’s portrait of Agostina Segatori. Browne identified such artists as important influences in a 1968 interview by Henry Ghent. In the New Yorkers and Little Men series alike, she powerfully adapts these historical precedents to achieve what she described as her “expressionistic response to American life” (27). Inspired by Browne’s bold color, the curators made a daring decision to paint the walls a deep blue in two galleries, including the one displaying the New Yorkers series, and it paid off by heightening the work’s liveliness.

The introduction to Browne’s early figurative work continued into the next gallery with several pastel drawings and four oil paintings, including a self-portrait, portraits of her mother and artist Camille Billops, and a painting titled The Prisoner. Browne created the last in response to the 1971 Attica prison uprising, and a black-and-white reproduction was included in the artist’s book Attica, copublished in 1971 by the BECC and the group Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the Attica book was not displayed in the vitrine near The Prisoner. Still, viewers could examine objects from Browne’s archive, including a sketchbook, photographs, exhibition posters, and an essay she wrote for the feminist journal Heresies. A detailed timeline appeared above the vitrine, featuring additional photographs of the artist.

The fourth gallery, titled “Abstraction and Internationalism: Africa and China,” focused on the transformative impact of Browne’s travels to China, Ghana, and Nigeria. The incredible range, scale, and number of works in this, the largest gallery of the exhibition, demonstrated the profound effect cross-cultural experiences had on Browne. She first visited West Africa in 1971 but waited until returning to the US to initiate a series based on memories of her travels. The resulting brilliantly colored abstract paintings, prints, and drawings evoke the patterns and contours of West African sculpture and textiles. And it is here that the curators applied the same deep blue to the walls as in the New Yorkers gallery, allowing the raucous mixture of yellows, oranges, and reds in the Africa series to glow.

The works on silk Browne created in response to travels in China, first in 1977 and then in 1982, take up a more restricted, subtle palette of greys and whites, sprinkled with muted blues, purples, greens, and yellows. Chosen for its ubiquity in Chinese art and culture, silk allowed Browne to explore translucency and surface in abstract paintings that evoke water, smoke, or mist. The largest China painting, Clear Particles Floating Free (1982), consists of a trio of unstretched silk panels loosely painted with strokes of blacks, whites, and greys that are suspended from the ceiling about a foot from a wall hung with three abstract pastels. The latter are barely visible through the translucent silk, and a layering effect is apparent when standing directly before the work. Other paintings in this gallery incorporate layers of silk stretched over canvas to which Browne applied washes of grey, producing a graphite-like surface. As viewers walk by, textured fields suggest glimmering and rippling water.

The penultimate gallery, titled “Landscape and Ecologies,” focused on what would become Browne’s final series: paintings inspired by the landscapes and massive redwoods of California, where she established a studio in the early 1980s, living bicoastally until she died in 1993. As I moved from the intense color and atmospheric surfaces of her Africa and China series to the more representational, yet equally emotive, tree series, I was awed by Browne’s versatility and masterful control of her mediums. In works like All Trace (ca. 1987), she overlaid loosely rendered trees with the rigid vertical lines of transmission towers. Entangled within this web of organic and linear forms, Browne painted words from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “all trace is gone . . . the rest is weather.” Other paintings in the gallery similarly layer imagery, gesture, and words as Browne engages in dialogue with Indigenous and Black women writers who share her concerns about humanity and the natural world. Wall text describes Browne’s use of words as “underscoring the connection between decolonial liberation and the need to protect the Earth’s most precious yet vulnerable resource—the natural world,” bringing the viewer back to the exhibition’s larger theme: art as personal and political protest.

Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest was undeniably belated but also could not have been timelier. It felt significant to see Browne’s first career retrospective in the nation’s capital at a moment when federally funded museums and cultural institutions face increased scrutiny over content the government perceives as too critical or divisive, especially as it relates to race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. It turns out the Little Men series is as frighteningly relevant today as it was sixty years ago. More broadly, witnessing Browne’s biting critiques of whiteness and patriarchy, her stunning abstractions inspired by cross-cultural experiences, and her series highlighting the inextricable connections between nature and the human condition will inspire current and future artists who believe in art’s capacity for personal and political protest.