Melissa Brown on Cat-Eyes, Ben Franklin and Painting the City's Flotsam

By Daniel Okafor

Melissa Brown has worn cat-eye makeup every day since she was a teenager, and it's a useful key to her paintings. The flick dates to ancient Egypt, where women wore mineral liner as protection against the evil eye. In Brown's work, the sacred and profane converge in mirrored surfaces, shop windows, psychics' tables and bedroom altars. Same eyeliner logic, different medium.

Her Flatbush studio sits above a busy deli, with a braiding salon upstairs. Visiting feels like walking into one of her paintings, where beauty rituals collide through glass.

What's in the paintings?

Brown collages techniques to convey the layering of daily experience: photography, plein-air painting (work done outdoors, on site), CMYK printing, airbrush and stencil. Some paintings carry QR codes linking to animations.

Her painting "Commute" (2020) shows a hand with press-on nails spinning meditation balls in an empty pandemic-era subway car passing the Brooklyn Bridge. Sunlight glows through the window. A painted strobe effect animates the fingers and reflective balls — a nod to the British Vorticist (early-20th-century abstract movement) painter Sybil Andrews.

Who is she, exactly?

Born in 1974 in Morristown, New Jersey, Brown grew up near Philadelphia. She earned a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000.

She now teaches at Lehman College, CUNY, and co-curated the two-venue group exhibition Does This Taste Funny? Humor in Contemporary Art, at Lehman College Art Gallery and the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College. Her recent solo show Window Shopping ran at Derek Eller Gallery in New York, where she has exhibited since 2017.

How did art get its hooks in?

The Ben Franklin Museum, it turns out. When her parents moved to Center City Philadelphia, the family lived nearby. The museum had recently been updated for the Bicentennial, with an infinity mirror room full of neon, interactive phones playing voices from history, and a glass harmonica.

"As a child, I was constantly asking to go there and my mom would take me," Brown said. "I even went through a phase where I wanted to be called 'Ben Franklin.' We visited his print shop a million times. It must have had an influence."

RISD came down to seduction, plainly stated. "I was seduced by it, and that was the determining factor," she said of her campus visit. "I went into their Woods-Gerry Gallery and felt it was where I wanted to be."

Last month, in the studio above the deli, the conversation ranged wider: her favorite Renaissance painting, the magic of finding motifs while walking the city, answers in flotsam, and how paintings can manifest experience. A print shop obsession, it seems, eventually prints back.