Brown worked with multiple other artists to make popular the concepts of figurative painting, Beat Generation culture, and Funk art.

[2] Joan Brown was born on February 19, 1938, in San Francisco to a second-generation Irish father and a native Californian mother.

Her father drank heavily and her mother, who had intended to have a career instead of a family, frequently threatened suicide.

[7] In 1956 she married her first husband, Bill Brown, a fellow student who had encouraged her to complete her course and work with Bischoff.

[8] However, right before their wedding, she became very ill. Bill Brown presented her with books that contained reproductions of paintings by Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez, and other masters.

[9] She was married to Bay Area Figurative sculptor Manuel Neri from 1962 to 1966, though their relationship and artistic collaboration dated back several years prior to this.

[10] Brown achieved prominence with a style of figurative painting that combined bright color, sometimes cartoonish drawing, and personal symbolism.

[11] As a teenager, Brown would flip through magazines and make pencil sketches of any celebrities she found to be sophisticatedly dressed.

[5] Influenced by Bischoff's teaching style, many of Brown's paintings were directly related to events that happened in her life.

[13] In 1960 and 1961, as Brown began to mature as an artist, she switched from painting abstract works to focusing more on figurative imagery.

[15] She produced few paintings in 1964 because she was occupied with teaching as well as dealing with the disintegration of her marriage to Neri, whom she divorced in 1966.

[7] She was a swimmer in amateur competitions and swam in the first women's Golden Gate swim in San Francisco Bay.

From 1961 until 1969, Brown taught introductory painting and drawing classes at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco.

[24] In the late 1970s, Brown became increasingly interested in spirituality and New Age ideas, eventually becoming a friend of Sathya Sai Baba.

Brown died along with Bonnie Lynn Mainric, 43, of San Francisco, and Michael Oliver, 25, a Santa Cruz comedian on 26 October 1990 when a concrete turret from the floor above collapsed while they were installing the mosaic obelisk at Sai Baba's Eternal Heritage Museum in Puttaparthi, India.

[27][28][29] In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.

[31] The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) holds twenty-five of her works in its collection[32] and, in November 2022, recognized her legacy with a major retrospective, including approximately eighty of Brown's paintings and sculptures.