Joan Brown. Painterland

Joan Brown modeling at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, ca. 1958–60.

fullscreen

Joan Brown was just shy of nineteen years old when she had an exhibition at Six Gallery in 1957, the renowned artists’ cooperative gallery in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco. Brown was building a close community of artists and poets centered around such artist-run spaces—including Spatsa Gallery and Batman Gallery—as well as North Beach bookstores and jazz clubs near the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where the artist was enrolled from 1955 to 1960.¹ In 1958 she and her husband, painter Bill Brown, moved into the apartment next door to Jay DeFeo and Wally Hedrick and cut a door-sized hole between their apartments to wander about more freely. It was “a family-type situation and a very charged environment,” described Brown, “with a whole bunch of people [who] are constantly butting up against each other on an almost twenty-four-hour-a-day basis.”² The building at 2322 Fillmore Street, dubbed Painterland by poet Michael McClure, was home to a mix of painters, poets, and musicians from around 1950 to 1965, many of whom had become key figures of the Beat Generation.³ “In this little community . . .” Hedrick described, “we were our own teachers and we taught each other.”⁴