His father, whose name was also Robert Delford Brown, was of Irish, German, and Dutch stock, originally hailing from a farm in Illinois.
He said that he once told his mother, “If you join the Daughters of the American Revolution, you've lost a son.” Brown was born a Junior but, like the DAR pedigree, dropped it, “I don’t need it.” The family moved to Long Beach when he was 12.
There were two books about white musicians in the library, biographies of white musicians, Frank Teschmacher, Muggsy Spanier and Pee Wee Russell.” With a friend, Bill Hagleheimer, Brown would attend jazz gigs in downtown Los Angeles, and at more respectable places like the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
And then there was a blind drummer who played the saxophone.” He continued, “You’d have 50 musicians up at a jazz concert, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, they all showed up.
As a student at Long Beach State College, Brown met the painter Ed Moses (artist) who had just gotten out of the service.
Moses later introduced him to the L.A. gallery owner Virginia Dwan, who rented him a second floor apartment over the merry-go-round in Santa Monica.
It kept him awake, “until 2 in the morning…’I’m looking over a four leaf clover’ over and over again...I lived at the Santa Monica Pier for 2 or 3 years.” Brown studied art at Long Beach College and at UCLA from 1948–1952, receiving his B.A.
He studied drawing with the Surrealist Howard Warshaw (1920–1977), who had been given his first solo exhibition by the legendary gallerist Julien Levy in 1945.
Warshaw, known for developing a unique language and philosophy of drawing, infused the scientific knowledge of the day in the work that must also have appealed to the young Brown who later became a vociferous disciple of Buckminster Fuller.
In Warshaw’s lines, like Brown’s early work, one can read the emotional tenor of the artist and subject.
Beginning in 1951, Warshaw taught at the University of California, which he continued for more than 20 years completing monumental murals for several UC campuses.
I didn’t have to talk until Rhett died.” An early significant event for Brown was his participation in Allan Kaprow’s presentation of the musical play entitled "Originale" by the German avantgarde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
This scandalous event was held at Judson Hall in New York City as part of the Second Annual Avant Garde Festival in 1964.
Brown created the memorable image of "the mad painter" which was splashed across the pages of local papers and national news magazines.
They immediately created a physical place for the headquarters of a work begun in 1964: The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc.
They held many openings and events at the Great Building Crack-Up, including a Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective workshop production of "Wicked Women."
Brown called the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. (FUNKUP for short) an Orthodox Pagan belief.
We will need all of the intelligence and of the energy we can muster.From his Church, Brown continued to create collaborative performance artworks for the next three decades.
He then showed up, armed with glue, scissors, rubber gloves, colored paper, magazines to cut up and several canvases for the participants to embellish collectively with their unschooled musings, each eventually transformed from a day-glo tabula rasa into a vibrant, swirling testimony to the power of joint action by non-artists, yet at the same time, surprisingly reminiscent of the likes of Miró, Kandinsky and of course, Matisse’s cutouts.
[3] Brown was found dead on March 24, 2009 in the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he had moved in 2007 to prepare for an exhibition at the Cameron Art Museum.
He was planning a happening which involved building rafts made of flip-flops and floating them down the river, originally inspired by local Wilmington artist Dixon Stetler.