Artist Colleen Browning (1918′003), a National Academician, played a significant role in America’s contemporary Realist movement in the years after 1950. Although she attained sensational early success on the American art scene, her fame has almost entirely evaporated. Fairfield University rediscovers and celebrates the career of this Anglo American Realist painter with two exhibitions, mounted jointly by the Bellarmine Museum of Art and the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery, and on view through March 24.
The two Fairfield University exhibitions highlight not only this prolific artist’s early works on paper and signature oils from the 1950s in the Bellarmine Museum’s “Colleen Browning: The Early Works” exhibition, but also a selection of compelling oil paintings created in the years after 1960, in the Walsh Gallery’s “Colleen Browning: A Brush With Magic.” Taken together, these works showcase and illustrate seven decades of the artist’s lengthy career.
The Bellarmine Museum of Art is on the lower level of Bellarmine Hall, and the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery is in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts on Fairfield University campus at 1073 North Benson Road.
Browning, of Irish heritage, was born in England in 1918. A child prodigy, she was still in her teens when she first exhibited in London, and she studied at the prestigious Slade School of Art on scholarship. Her first solo show was in London’s Little Art Gallery in 1949. That same year, she moved to New York City, where her works began arousing critical acclaim. She exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1952 annual exhibition and held her first US solo exhibition a year later, at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York.
Throughout her career, Browning was a teacher, mentor and role model to artists at the Pratt Institute, the City College of New York and the National Academy of Design. Her works are held by many private and public collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Milwaukee Art Center, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the New York State Art Museum.
She was selected to exhibit in many major invitational exhibitions at venues such as the Whitney Museum in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
These shows †which will be traveling nationally †were organized by the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art (SAMA).
For additional information, www.fairfield.edu/museum or www.fairfield.edu/arts/qc or 203-254-4046.
