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Marcus Brown
A native of New Orleans, Marcus Brown is a sculptor, painter, inventor, musician, and educator. Brown holds a M.Ed. from Portland State University and BFA from Kansas City Institute of Art (KCAI) in Missouri. His work is expansive and includes national and international exhibits and performances in New York City, Berlin, Germany, and Krakow, Poland, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, McKenna Art Gallery, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, to name a few. Brown currently has public sculptures in Biloxi, Mississippi (Human Universal Musical Sound [HUMS]) and The New Leaf on St. Bernard Ave., St. Peter Claver and Henriette Delille at St. Peter Claver School in New Orleans. He also has sound sculptures at JAMNOLA and recently developed a public piece for interactive display at the 2022 New Orleans French Quarter Festival.
Mentors like the late Lin Emery, John T. Scott, and Jim Leedy, collectively instilled in Brown the importance of always learning and experimenting to create your own path. In that vein, Brown developed a form of painting called Electro-sonic Painting in which the artist paints with sound/data producing instruments. He has performed with his invention in several venues both locally and nationally. In addition to his performance art, Brown has exhibited with artists such as Andy Warhol, Chris Burden, Hannah Wilke, and others around the world.
Brown is currently combining a new form of creative storytelling using Augmented Reality (AR) sculptures with interactive multimedia elements. His latest project, Passage, is a geotagged musically interactive augmented reality (AR) sculpture installation series based on slave ships and enslaved peoples.
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in a commitment to engaging history, identity, and collective memory. As an artist with enslaved African ancestors, I approach my practice as both a responsibility and an opportunity to tell stories that have been suppressed, while creating new forms that connect people across time and experience.
I work across visual, sonic, performative, and interactive media, drawing from African American and Creole traditions of combining multiple forms into a unified language. Like a New Orleans gumbo, my practice brings together disparate materials and influences to create layered, immersive compositions.
Shaped by the musical and cultural traditions of my African American, Native, and European heritage, I approach art-making as a technical, scholarly, and performative process—one that seeks to reframe history while opening space for shared experience and transformation.
My definition of art
Art is a prayer in making. - Marcus Brown
mediums
My work uses traditional media like wood, steel, clay, aluminum, bronze, and non-traditional interactive technologies. I like to make both meta and physical sculpture.
One constant theme in my work has been marrying ancient ideas and practices with new technologies. Most of my public work in New Orleans is created for schools, churches, and communities.