Robert Delford Brown

Robert Delford Brown (October 25, 1930 – c. March 22, 2009) was an American performance artist. The New York Times called him "a painter, sculptor, performance artist and avant-garde philosopher whose exuberantly provocative works challenged orthodoxies of both the art world and the world at large, usually with a big wink." Deborah Velders of the Cameron Museum of Art in Wilmington, N.C. called him "a visionary" and "the William Blake of our time."

Allan Kaprow, credited with originating the Happening movement in the early 1960s, said of Robert Delford Brown:

The ecstatic power that has marked Brown's art since the 1960s threw a monkey wrench into the avant garde in those days. He was (and is) a visionary you couldn't ignore or forget. Brown's work is important. He touches a nerve at the core of the social codes that organize not only our behavior but also the limits of our art… Robert Delford Brown's transcendent vision takes on a great significance.

Robert Delford Brown was born in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains during the Great Depression in Portland, Colorado. “It was very rural,” he said in a series of interviews he did with his biographer, the artist and writer Mark Bloch. His father was employed testing cement as a chemical technician. "I was born in Central Colorado in 1930. No one is more American than I am,” he told Bloch in 2006. Both sides of his family had been in the USA since Revolutionary times. His father, whose name was also Robert Delford Brown, was of Irish, German, and Dutch stock, originally hailing from a farm in Illinois. His mother’s family were farmers from Kansas. He said that he once told his mother, “If you join the Daughters of the American Revolution, you've lost a son.” Brown was born a Junior but, like the DAR pedigree, dropped it, “I don’t need it.” The family moved to Long Beach when he was 12. “For my benefit,” he added.

Soon after, Brown discovered jazz, a passion he held throughout his life. “I don’t know how I stumbled on it. I think I found these books in the Junior High School library. There were two books about white musicians in the library, biographies of white musicians, Frank Teschmacher, Muggsy Spanier and Pee Wee Russell.” With a friend, Bill Hagleheimer, Brown would attend jazz gigs in downtown Los Angeles, and at more respectable places like the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There was this place called The Lightning Room, and the Lightning Room had a little stage about 3 feet by 3 feet and then strip, the strip teaser would do this dance on this little platform. And then there was a blind drummer who played the saxophone.” He continued, “You’d have 50 musicians up at a jazz concert, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, they all showed up. And I was like 15 years old. My mother would drive me and sit outside while I was in there …a little white boy with all these black people. And the black guys… they’d be passing quarts of vodka around.” He didn’t partake despite being introduced to beer at 15. He was there for the music.

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