Delia Brown

Brown is the recipient of the 2019 Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. In her recent work, Brown has stopped using photographs as a source material in favor of a heavy stylization influenced by Futurism and Cubism. These new paintings were exhibited in her 2018 solo exhibition Demoiselles d’Avignon at Tibor de Nagy in New York.

Brown has worked with actress Hollis Witherspoon in developing a fictional artist character called Chelsey Green, whose paintings and performances Brown devises and then hands off to Witherspoon the job of playing "author" to the projects. To date, Witherspoon-as-Green has been seen in a painting and video exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles (2006) titled Step-and-Repeats and Double Self-Portraits.

Brown graduated from University of California, Los Angeles in 2000.

Best known for painted scenes that include her friends cavorting in places of specific privilege (such as art collectors' homes), Brown gained notoriety in October 2000 when The New York Times Magazine ran an eight-page spread of her watercolors posing as fashion editorial. This publication coincided with her debut exhibition at D'Amelio Terras gallery in Chelsea, titled What! Are You Jealous? (featuring scenes of women drinking champagne poolside in Beverly Hills-ish backyards, with the title borrowed from a Gauguin painting of Tahitian women lounging likewise), which was attacked by Times critic Michael Kimmelman who called the buzz around her work a "pseudo-event".

Delia Brown (born 1969) is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from California. She is one of several artists who gained notice at a moment when much attention was being paid to the graduates of Los Angeles-area MFA programs.

Witherspoon also plays a character in Brown's on-going project titled Felicity and Caprice, a narrative series of paintings and drawings which draw upon Claude Chabrol's camp masterpiece of 1960s French cinema, Les Biches. A series of drawings on this theme was exhibited at D'Amelio Terras in 2007 and received praise from critics. Writing in The New York Times, Martha Schwendener says "Ms. Brown has taken hold of a cache of references, from commercial illustration to French erotic cinema, and spun it into a deadpan, streamlined narrative about women, friendship and patronage".