During the 1980s, his paintings, mixing the modernist tradition of painterly application and adherence to the picture surface with clear influences from tribal art.
In the early 1980s, he began exhibiting in New York, and in this decade this work became a hit in the galleries and art press, sharing a look with the Bad Painting and young neo-expressionism of the East Village painters of the time.
His work has taken on several styles over the years but maintains a hand-made look combining concerns of the modernist tradition with motifs and spiritual interests from tribal art.
Besides paintings Brown has also produced sculptures and series of prints at various points in his career, and in the 1990s started to heavily utilize collage.
In an Artforum review of a 25-year retrospective, Martha Schwendener noted, "The works range from abstract gouaches to biomorphic and figurative watercolors to collages that update the synthetic Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque.
New York 2005 Ex-Escuela Quintana Roo, "James Brown 10 acos en Oaxaca," Mérida, Mexico.
(This exhibition traveled internationally) 2007 Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris (Showing his abstract "Firmament Series") 2014 Livingstone Gallery, The Hague (NL)