San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) is pleased to announce artist Delia Brown as the recipient of the 2019 Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship. Established in 1998 by the family of renowned painter Richard Diebenkorn, who studied and taught at SFAI beginning in the 1940s, this fellowship makes it possible for a contemporary artist to both teach at SFAI and pursue independent studio work.
Delia Brown is a painter exploring how high-tech culture encourages and facilitates a preoccupation with our own image, and shines a light on the flattening of our relationship to the larger world we inhabit. In the early 2000s she became known for a naturalistic style of representational painting that combined sharp social critique with humor and highly personal introspection. Her work over the last two years has seen a move towards an abstracted figuration, focusing on how our relationship to technology (specifically: smartphones) amplifies our narcissistic and myopic tendencies, engendering a troubling disengagement from the world around us. Brown has held numerous solo exhibitions in the US and abroad, and is represented in museum collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Brown received her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1992 and her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000.
Brown will teach two courses during the fall 2019 semester, give a public lecture in the Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture series, and engage with the SFAI community through individual student critiques and other academic activities. SFAI Department Chair of Painting, Taravat Talepasand states, “Brown is well known for a refined and incisive realism, based on photographs she stages and shoots herself. Her new works’ looser, more adventurous paint handling comes out of a particular personal and cultural context. For the twenty-first anniversary of the establishment of the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at SFAI, we’re enthusiastically looking forward to having Delia Brown join us as the 2019 Fellow. Delia’s rigorous approach to realism and flexibility to evolve intuitively as a painter in the age of technology were essential in her selection. Her rigorous dedication to experimental painting practice combined with her passion for teaching and always being fresh exemplifies the all-encompassing spirit of the Diebenkorn Fellowship.”
Brown comments: “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to engage with the dynamic creative community of the San Francisco Art Institute. I look forward to working alongside my students, and other faculty, and increased exposure to the incredible natural beauty and diverse culture that San Francisco offers. I feel a certain resonance, too, with the namesake of this award, having been a lifelong fan of Diebenkorn’s work. It seems prescient that I spent the summers of my youth walking the very streets depicted in his Ocean Park paintings, to get to the beach…and that my sister’s family’s home faces Deibenkorn’s Hillcrest Road home, which is right across the street!”
Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship
The Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship is dedicated to the memory of distinguished painter Richard Diebenkorn. In January 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled at SFAI as a student, and in September was awarded the school’s Albert Bender Grant, which allowed him to travel and work independently for a year. Diebenkorn went to New York and, when he returned the following year, was offered his first teaching appointment at SFAI. He taught through 1949, and again from 1959 to 1966. The Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship was established in 1998 to honor his contributions as a teacher and to provide a similar opportunity to contemporary artists.
This prestigious award has been given to twenty-one artists since 1998, including Brad Brown, Shaun O’Dell, Iona Rozeal Brown, Josephine Taylor, Monica Majoli, Polly Apfelbaum, Liam Everett and Katherine Kuharic. See a complete list of recipients here.
The Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship is funded by the generosity of the family of Richard Diebenkorn.
About SFAI
Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in the practice and study of contemporary art. As a diverse community of working artists and scholars, SFAI provides students with a rigorous education in the arts and preparation for a life in the arts through an immersive studio environment, an integrated liberal arts and art history curriculum, and critical engagement with the world. Committed to educating artists who will shape the future of art, culture, and society, SFAI fosters creativity and original thinking in an open, experimental, and interdisciplinary context.
SFAI offers BFA, BA, MFA, and MA degrees, a dual MA/MFA degree, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, and a range of exhibitions, public programs, and public education courses. Notable past faculty and alumni include Lance Acord, Ansel Adams, Kathryn Bigelow, Enrique Chagoya, Angela Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Kos, George Kuchar, Annie Leibovitz, Barry McGee, Manuel Neri, Catherine Opie, Peter Pau, Laura Poitras, Clyfford Still, and Kehinde Wiley.
