Gallery Talk: Growing Up in the Shadow of Black Abstraction with Michaela Pilar Brown

Celebrate the work of Sam Gilliam during a gallery talk led by Michaela Pilar Brown, South Carolina artist, 2024 Joan Mitchell fellow, and owner of Mike Brown Contemporary Art Gallery. Learn about what it was like to be an artist in her formative years during Gilliam’s time in the Washington, D.C., area, and the value of exposure to working Black professional artists for aspiring young talent. Q&A to follow. 

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Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

Michaela Pilar Brown is an image and object maker. She studied sculpture and art history at Howard University, though she has always been a maker of things. Born in Bangor, Maine, and raised in Denver, Colorado, she cut her teeth in the halls of a museum where her mother worked as a security guard, and has been immersed in the culture of objects, their making and interpretation ever since. 
 
Brown is an independent curator and multidisciplinary artist using photography, installation, collage, painting, and performance.  Brown is a 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellow, the 2018 grand prize winner of Artfields juried art competition. She was a 2018 inaugural resident artist of the Volcanic Residency, Whakatane Museum, Whakatane, New Zealand, and one of the six American artists selected to participate as a Resident Artist for OPEN IMMERSION: A VR CREATIVE DOC LAB produced by the CFC Media Lab, The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and JustFilms | Ford Foundation in Toronto, Canada, an Inaugural Resident Artist at the 2016 Sedona Summer Colony and a 2016 Artist in Residence, Kunstlerwerkgemeinschaft Kaiserslautern, Germany and has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the McColl Center for Art and Innovation. Her work can be found in private and public museum collections in the United States including the Columbia Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Paul R. Jones Museum at the University of Alabama, the Stanbeck Museum.  
 
Brown is the former Executive Director of 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina., where she served from 2020-2022.  She has served on multiple boards including One Columbia SC, One Columbia for Arts & History is a non-profit organization formed to support and promote tourism in Columbia, South Carolina, and was also a board member of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the oldest ongoing feminist granting agency, and currently serves on the board of directors of the Friends of African American Art and Culture, an affinity group of the Columbia Museum of Art. For more than 10 years she has served as a facilitator for Artists U, an incubator for changing the working conditions of artists where everything is artist-run and open-source. She is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC, whose goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. She is the new owner/director of Mike Brown Contemporary Art Gallery formerly If ART.