The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

BROWN, EUGENE JESSE (1895?‒1963).

A regionally renowned African American painter, art educator, and prominent member of the Oklahoma art community, Eugene Jesse Brown was born on February 6, 1895 (some sources say 1896), in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He received his early education in public schools. In August 1918, while a college a student, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served fourteen months in France during World War I. In 1926 he married Maud Eva Cox in Arkansas, and the union produced two daughters.

After his military service Brown studied art at the University of Kansas. In 1924 he came to Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University), Langston, Oklahoma, to start an art department. By 1929 he had created a four-year art program and was named to the chair of the department, a position he retained until 1961. In the 1920s and 1930s Brown studied art variously at the John Herron Art Institute (Indianapolis, Indiana), the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the University of Iowa, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Focusing on depictions of Black life in a regionalist style, his primary painting medium was oil, but he also produced watercolors. In later years he experimented in modernism.

Eugene Brown was a member of the Western Arts Association and the Oklahoma Arts Association (OAA). The latter group was founded in the 1930s by Oscar Brousse Jacobson of the University of Oklahoma. Brown showed annually in the OAA’s members exhibition at the Oklahoma Art Center in Oklahoma City. In 1945 he was honored with a one-man show there, and in 1953 he took second place in the OAA show, behind Oklahoma artist Leonard Good. OAA elected Brown its vice president in February 1951. Other shows included regular invitations to the Philbrook Art Center’s annual Exhibition of Oklahoma Artists, the Mulvane Art Center’s annual Missouri Valley Artists Exhibition (Topeka, Kansas), and the John Herron Museum. He received national recognition in 1953 at the Twelfth Annual Exhibition of Painting, Sculpture, and Prints by Negro Artists, Atlanta University (Atlanta, Georgia).

After directing the Langston art department for three decades, Eugene Jesse Brown relinquished his post and retired in 1961. He died on May 29, 1963, in Oklahoma City. His works are held in the Oklahoma State Art Collection as well as in the collections of Langston University and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, Oklahoma).

Dianna Everett