Christopher Brown (born 1951),^[1] is an American artist and educator. He is known for his paintings and prints, often figurative and feature abstract settings with repeating patterns or shapes.^[2][3] He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 1994.^[4] Brown has also worked as an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts.^[5] Brown's work is associated with neo-expressionism.^[6]

Christopher Brown was born in 1951 at the United States Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina.^[1] His father was a doctor.^[5] He was raised in Warren, Ohio and in Urbana, Illinois.^[1]

Brown attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received a B.A. degree in 1973; followed by a M.F.A. degree in 1976 from the University of California, Davis (U.C. Davis).^[1][7] At U.C. Davis during his graduate studies, he was a student of Wayne Thiebaud, William T. Wiley, and Roy De Forest.^[1][8][9]

Many of Brown's large scale painting works are painted from memory and he sometimes uses photographs for reference.^[2] He creates collage-like arrangements within his paintings, which feature figurative images in surrealistic juxtapositions.^[6] It is common to also see repeating patterns or shapes within the painting background.

In 1977, Brown had his first solo exhibition at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco; and in 1995 he held his first traveling museum solo exhibition, History and Memory: Paintings by Christopher Brown, organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.^[5]

From 1981 until 1994; Brown served as a Professor and later as the Department Chair at the University of California, Berkeley.^[1]

Brown's work is in museum collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,^[10] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[11] the Cleveland Museum of Art,^[12] the National Gallery of Art,^[13] and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.^[5]