Chapter 1: What painting did Maia find in the garbage?
Pushkin.
Hi. Hello. Today we're going to revisit an episode that I reported. It's called Frederick J. Brown.
Oh. Oh, yeah. Okay.
It's about art. It's about a painting.
Amazing. I love art. You know that, right?
Yeah, you're always talking about how much you love art.
Is that true?
No.
Oh, I don't want to become one of those art bores. Are we talking about fine art?
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Chapter 2: Who is Frederick J. Brown and why is he significant?
Who do you think loves it more, me or you?
Probably you.
Really?
Maybe just because this is going to sound rude, but you're added years of experience.
Sure, I've had a lot of time in the game of ogling art. You know, you might be surprised to learn that a person like myself, I'm not much of an art snob in the sense that I believe that everybody possesses artistic and creative ability.
Wow, that's beautiful.
Now I'm off my high horse. I'm going to get on my low horse, my show pony.
Okay.
And away we go. Away we go. Do you know whose catchphrase that was?
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Chapter 3: What was Maya's initial reaction to the painting?
Thanks for your support.
Every Friday night during the pandemic, I'd get on a Google Hangout with a group of my boyfriend's friends, and we'd all play Mario Kart. I'm going to do 150 CCs, breaking items, no comms, six races. These Mario Kart sessions started back in the days when we could barely leave the house due to COVID restrictions.
So it felt like an escape to log on, to carelessly careen in a small car, or kart, if you will, through a gold mine or off a waterfall. In those dark days, a few minutes on Mount Wario was the closest thing I could get to a vacation. Ready? That being said, I also found these Mario Kart hangouts deeply intimidating because I'm not good at Mario Kart. My gameplay mostly sounds like this. Oh, no.
Or this. Oh, no. Along with the Mario Karting, there was also non-Mario chatting. Oh, yeah. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. And chatting of any kind is another thing I'm not good at. Every so often, I'd weigh in with something like, Pretty crazy. This was essentially the extent of my engagement. Until the night Maya told us about the painting.
Maya found the painting sitting in a pile of trash on the sidewalk, and it grabbed her instantly. It was only later, when she took it home, that she saw the artist's signature, Frederick J. Brown. Although Maya works in art, the name was unfamiliar to her, so she Googled him.
And what popped up was a lengthy New York Times obituary from 2012, praising Brown's work and citing Willem de Kooning as an early mentor. Brown, it turned out, was an acclaimed Black artist, known for his portraits of jazz and blues musicians. He had work in the Smithsonian.
As Maya made her way through his biography, she slowly realized that the painting she'd been so instinctively drawn to was actually the work of an important artist. And so, Maya was left wondering, how did Brown's painting end up in the trash? Wow, very regal building. On a cold Friday afternoon, I pay Maya a visit at her Brooklyn apartment building to follow up and learn more.
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Chapter 4: How did the painting end up in the trash?
And who knows? Maybe my boyfriend's friend can simply become a friend. Hello. Come on in. Very, like, regal building, I feel like. My IRL chatting is truly no better than my Mario Kart chatting.
This is your first time here also. It is, yeah.
What I couldn't see on the small square of our Mario Kart calls was that every surface of Maya's apartment is covered in art. Not only has Maya worked in the art world for many years, at galleries, art publishers, her husband Wes is also an artist himself. He even proposed to Maya on the steps of the Met. There's really only one spot in their apartment that's empty, a blank wall above the couch.
They'd been waiting, year after year, for the perfect work of art to hang there. And now, with the discovery of the Frederick J. Brown painting, they knew they'd found it. Maya says she spotted the painting while heading home from a COVID test. It was gigantic, and she still had a mile to walk. She knew it didn't really make sense to take it with her. But she couldn't walk away from it either.
I just kept going back to it. It just was... Different from all of the other paintings I've seen, it just really kind of grabbed me, and I started trying to get it out of the trash.
Clutching the huge painting to her body, Maya awkwardly waddled the mile home.
There was like a little garbage juice at the bottom and a little dust at the top. When I was walking, I wouldn't let it sit on the ground. I know I had probably been on the street all day, but I didn't want it to be on the street anymore. It is nearly as long as I am tall, and I'm 5'4". Lots of color and patterns.
Despite my fondness for the audio medium, it fails to translate the force of Brown's painting. It's not as easily encapsulated as, say, the Mona Lisa, Smiling Woman, or American Gothic, Unsmiling Woman, and Man.
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Chapter 5: What insights did Bentley provide about his father's work?
It's mostly abstract, but then there are these tiny spots with recognizable figures.
You can see faces, and there's these horizontal bands that sort of organize the composition.
Admiring the painting with Maya makes me feel like I'm at a fancy party, enjoying hors d'oeuvres, but also panicked that I have nothing intelligent to say. That kind of looks like a seven. The painting feels like a stained glass cabinet full of curios. It feels like a quilt, if a quilt weren't made of fabric, but of fields and buildings and people rushing to work.
It feels like a packed room where everybody's dancing. I ask Maya to show me where she first found the painting, and so we hit the streets to return to the scene of the trash.
Should we walk? Yeah, let's walk.
We take a walk, as friends often do. Maya tells me the painting was in the trash with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. A TJ Maxx planter, a stained toy chest. Whoever disposed of it was probably moving. Maybe a neighbor can tell us who might have moved in the last couple months.
But whereas I was picturing a small building with just a few buzzers to ring, it turns out the trash heap was actually in front of a public housing complex, 14 stories high, taking up a whole block. We loiter by the building's entrance, and I try to catch people as they're going in or out. Can I ask you something weird? Can I ask you a weird question?
Do you know anyone who moved out, like, in December? It's just about a painting that was left outside. A painting? My friend found a painting, and she's trying to figure out, like, what the deal is. Nobody knows anything. No. All right, thank you. No, thank you. No, all right, thank you. There's a lot I don't understand about art. Like, why are frames so expensive?
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Chapter 6: What role did Lowry Sims play in Frederick J. Brown's career?
But I can tell you this. Paintings, they have two sides. There's the side with all the paint on it that people are always tripping over each other to talk about. But then there's the other side, the second or back side, if you will.
water or tea or anything? Water would be great.
And back at Maya's apartment, she explains that on this backside, or derriere side, there's another clue. She and Wes were cleaning the painting off, getting it ready to hang on the wall when they saw it. Lightly scrawled on the back of the canvas was an inscription.
Painted 1979, December. Title, Genesis II, Love, Happy Birthday. From Frederick to Lowry Sims. And then he signed it and dated it 1979. 1979.
Maya may not have known the name Frederick Brown, but she knew the name Lowry Sims quite well. Lowry was the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and before that, she'd been the first Black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She's now in her 70s and has had decades of impact on the art world. She's reached living legend status.
You can't help but be like, oh, okay, yeah. Should I have not used a paper towel to clean this?
The way Maya sees it, if you find something with someone else's name on it, whether that's a wallet, a cat, or a painting, you try to give it back to them. And so, she wants to return the painting to its rightful owner, Lowry Sims. And once we find her, maybe Lowry can help piece together how the painting ended up in the garbage. I would, like, love to help try and get in touch with this person.
Yes, please.
Okay.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did Frederick J. Brown face as a Black artist?
I explain that I have a painting I think belongs to her, but perhaps fearing I'm running some sort of con where I trade paintings for social security numbers, Lowry doesn't respond.
Hi, how are you?
I need some sort of inroad, so I contact an artist named Chloe Bass, who's worked with Lowry.
I don't know why she would even need LinkedIn. Like, that's how, like, her career is very well established.
Chloe's also confused by how the painting ended up in the trash. She says Lowry can't have been the one to throw it away because Lowry doesn't live in Brooklyn and never has. Chloe agrees to reach out to her on my behalf. And now that the request isn't coming from a rando on LinkedIn, but a rando who knows Chloe Bass, Lowry responds. We have a few back and forths over email.
I'm hoping to schedule a time for us to talk on the phone, but Lowry is reluctant. She tells me she doesn't want to talk unless she can see a photo of the painting first. So I send her a photo, saying I'd be curious if she recognizes Genesis 2, and equally curious if she doesn't. Who knows, maybe Brown's gift of the painting never even reached her.
The next morning, Lowry writes back, quote, intriguing, period. That is the extent of her email. And after that, our correspondence comes to a halt.
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Chapter 8: How will the painting be preserved for future generations?
I start to wonder if maybe the painting's a fake. Genesis 2 doesn't look like any of the other Frederick Brown paintings I've seen online. Maybe Lowry's intriguing means an intriguing forgery. So I contact Frederick Brown's trust. I figure they'll know best if the painting's really his. And five days later, I get confirmation that the painting is legit.
I receive a call from a man named Bentley, who teaches at Fordham and is a PhD candidate at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Bentley is also, it turns out, Frederick J. Brown's son.
So here's the backstory. The painting is part of a larger painting called Genesis.
Okay.
That's in the collection of the Met.
Oh, whoa, I didn't know that.
So my dad became the youngest artist to be in the collection of the Met at that time. Like at 33. Jeez. Let's see, let me think about that. Actually, 34. Okay. And like on top of that, right, as a Black artist as well, right? So this is a big deal. So part one is at the Met.
Part one, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part two, in a trash heap on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Bentley can't wait to see his father's painting in person, so he makes the drive from the Bronx to Maya's apartment in Brooklyn.
Hi. I'm Maya. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you in person.
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