Judith Brassard Brown’s new paintings are installed in dialogue with Ezra Pryor’s poetry. The installation, and the accompanying book (by this mother and son team), offers space to engage with untangling, processing, and healing trauma. Brown's paintings reference scenes from everyday life such as still lives, landscapes, and portraits but they do not recreate a specific location, time, or event. Rather, color and materials are energetically layered to contrast what we see with what we sense below the surface, inviting the viewer to reflect on these memories as their own. 

Brown has spent her life as a painter creating images as meditative spaces for the viewer to confront, process, and explore the messy business of being human. Her practice involves writing and research in support of making these complex, layered works, believing that the more we bring personal connections to the words and images on the wall or in books, the more we can use the meditative spaces of art to untangle and heal personally, as well as contribute to our communities.

The Path Through: A Book of Paintings and Poetry

Ask Ezra Podcast with Guest Judith Brassard Brown

Artist Biography

Judith Brassard Brown is a professor working with freshman and upper-level courses in the Foundation and Painting Departments at Montserrat College of Art; she is also adjunct faculty at Northeastern University’s College of Art, Media and Design.  Currently represented by the Kingston Gallery in Boston (since 2005), and the Robert Collins Gallery in Rockport, MA (since 2022). Other home bases have included The Arden Gallery (1993-2005) in Boston, The Hopkins Gallery in Wellfleet (1990-98) and the Gimbel Gallery of Contemporary Art in NYC (1981-84). Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Danforth Museum (Framingham, MA) the Art Complex Museum (Duxbury, MA), Soho20 (NYC), Cerulean Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), HallSpace in Boston, MA, and venues in Rome, Viterbo and Trieste, Italy. Artist books are increasingly paired with her studio work. In discussing her most recent publications and exhibitions, Brown writes, " Like the disparate elements coordinated in paintings or as we sleep, poems and narratives offer departure points to question, revisit or reprocess experience.

Her work has been reviewed and featured in articles in The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Art New England, ArtScope, Cape Cod Voice, Delicious Line, Boston Traveler, Il Messagero Viterbo and Trieste's Il Piccolo. Brassard Brown's work is included in corporate and private collections in the United States and abroad.