RYAN LEE is pleased to announce The Trees Speak, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Vivian Browne (b. 1929 Laurel, FL – d. 1993 New York, NY) inspired by the intersection of humans and nature that she observed in the California landscape. Ranging from small paintings to grand triptychs, some of the works on view were included in the 2025 museum retrospective Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest, but many of them haven’t been exhibited for 30 years. This is RYAN LEE’s third solo exhibition of Browne’s work.

These paintings, created between 1964 and 1992, reveal Browne’s heightened awareness of man’s impact on nature. In a 1988 artist statement, Browne wrote, “As a child growing up in Queens, NY, when it was still possible to walk through open fields and small orchards, I became fascinated with trees. That compelling attraction combined with a growing concern for environmental issues has led to references to plant life in much of my work of the past ten years.”

Curator Lowery Stokes Sims concurred, noting that Browne “captured the wonderment of a child’s first infatuation with trees encapsulated in the dramatic upsweep of the perspective in many of these paintings.” This is epitomized in the monumental painting Kings Canyon (1992), named after Kings Canyon National Park which contains some of the world’s largest stands of sequoia trees. Creating a patchwork of abstracted elements, Browne plays with perspective and color. The works in this exhibition, pulsing with energy and repeated patterns, are studies of light and space and the ways that humans intervene in nature.

In 1964, Browne traveled to California for the first time when she received a six-month Huntington Hartford fellowship, dedicating herself to art full time and finding inspiration in the local topography. During this time, she created Pacific Palisades (1964-65), which foreshadowed both her interest in painting trees as well as the color palette she would favor throughout her career.

Browne returned to California in the 1980s and became captivated with the monumental trees that she encountered in places like Yosemite National Park. Her studio overlooked a “bunch of tangled trees,” as her friend Emma Amos described it. She photographed power lines and transmission towers and began to visually juxtapose the linearity of tree branches and trunks with the metal bars of the pylons. Later, she began to superimpose these natural and manmade shapes, considering them as competing sources of energy. Browne said, “In a world fast becoming stripped of its natural resources, forms of the big trees seemed to me to be symbolic of power, strength and endurance.” The painting titled Global Warming (1987) represents Browne’s prescient anxiety about the environment as she used what was, at the time, a newly popular term for climate change.

Embedded in the abstract patterns of the trees in paintings such as All Trace (c. 1987) are encoded words by Black female writers – in this case, a quote from Toni Morrison’s acclaimed 1987 novel Beloved. Browne faced decades of pressure to paint “Black art” – meaning figurative art about Black themes. In an act of defiance and celebration, she made her trees “Black” by imbuing them with writing by Black female authors.