Phoenix S. Brown graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2019 with an art history minor and focus in painting. In 2018, she was a resident artist at Yale Norfolk School of Art. In 2021, Brown was awarded an individual artist grant by gener8tor Art and was artist-in-residence at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. She currently works in her studio in Milwaukee and leads the curatorial department at Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Art Museums as Senior Curator. Her work was been exhibited nationally and can be found in New American Paintings.
An interdisciplinary artist, she uses painting, drawing, and sound to understand her personal narrative and inner power while subversing western ideals of nature, still life, and portraiture. Brown is influenced by divination and her guitar background and uses diverse modes of making and materials to disrupt and reclaim western conventions of painting as a woman of color. By doing this, her work challenges art historical tropes of the Black female body and makes botanical taxonomy, a European construct, impossible to employ through abstracting landscape imagery.
Sound and music add a fourth-dimensional layer to her visual work. Being present in the studio with instruments frees Brown to produce musical scores for her works through improvisation. Active listening and abstraction allows Brown to embrace the act of "woodshedding," a historical practice in the canon of Jazz and Blues music.
She is an Aquarius Sun, Cancer Moon, and Capricorn Rising. In numerology, her lucky number is one.