Biography
Melissa Brown (b.1974) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings explore mundane events in her life as otherworldly tapestries of symbols, alignments, hidden messages, invisible effects, and transformations, revealing reality to be much more complex than we perceive it to be. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Cellar Contemporary, Trento, Two Pair and Windows and Bars at Derek Eller Gallery in New York City, West Coast Paintings at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, Thrift Store Find at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Fountain, Melissa Brown and Jamie Bull at Dodd Gallery at the University of Georgia, Going AWOL at the Biggins Gallery, Auburn University. For over ten years she has organized poker tournaments where the wager is art at galleries, art fairs, and most recently, at the Center for Book Arts in New York City.
She has participated in group exhibitions at Everyday Mooonday Seoul, Korea, Parker Gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, Mass MOCA, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Klaus Von Nichtssagend and Musée International Des Arts Modestes, France, and Deitch Projects, Los Angeles. In 2024, she was awarded a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program residency. In 2012, she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painter’s Grant and a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2019. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Department of Education and the Fidelity Corporate Collection. She is a Professor in studio art at Lehman College, CUNY.
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