Collector: Phillip Brown's Spirit of Expressionism Collection

THE FLORIDA TIMES UNION
By Charlie Patton

DON BURK/The Times-Union |
Owner stands next to a bronze crucifix and a painting titled “Red Christ."

FLORIDA - Some "outsider artists," once discovered, became celebrated, artists such as Howard Finster, whose work is currently being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville. Extend the term "outsider" to collectors and you have Phillip Brown, a Jacksonville pharmacist and art collector. Brown goes one step beyond outsider collector, however. He's an outsider art museum owner.

The Brown Art Museum, also referred to on its website as the Brown Museum of Art and the Brown Art Museum of Spirit Expressionism Peace and Art, is in a two-story house on West Eighth Street, not far from Shands Jacksonville. His museum houses about 1,500 pieces of art Brown has collected during the last two decades. He coined the term "spirit expressionism."

"That's what I'm good at, spirituality," Brown said. His museum has many pieces filled with religious signs and symbols, some realistic and obvious, some abstract and clear only to the artist and to Brown.

While Brown is a non-denominational Christian - the church he most recently attended was Mount Olive AME - his taste in religious art seems non-sectarian. [link]