Lucasen Brown: Stanza (Oct 9 - Dec 5)

This exhibition will be on view at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s Miller Hall at 406 Prospect Street, New Haven from October 9 - December 5 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 12 - 4 p.m, except for Thanksgiving week when the ISM is closed.

Lucasen Brown: Stanza presents a series of twenty intimate-scaled abstract paintings developed during Brown's time at Yale Institute of Sacred Music/Yale Divinity School (2023-2025). The exhibition also includes a selection of works on paper with corresponding poems by 2025 ISM graduate Emily Chan from a small book-length collaboration.

Each painting has an association for the artist: a life event, a place, a feeling, a person. Brown explores ways the painting process weaves memory, trauma and spiritual repair: "Wholeness, to me, is when I am just a painter in the world who allows a world of feeling into my abstract paintings—a place where everything belongs.” The paintings hold space for viewers to consider their own healing through faith, noticing, and remaining open to uncertainty.

Paint, for Brown, becomes both a surface and a subject. The artist hopes the paintings evoke corporeality, silence, interiority, and sacred everydayness. The repetition of marks on the painting surfaces is meditative and accretive.

The paintings are informed by textile, specifically Lenore Tawney's open-warp weavings; art movements including Minimalism and Pattern Painting and Decoration; and essays, namely Roland Barthes' theory of text and textile.

The exhibition traces the paintings’ transition from grid-based abstraction to a more intuitive and emotionally attuned process that pushes beyond the limitation of the grid. The artist realized his painting world, emotional and liberative, could no longer be confined to a grid.

Free and open to the public.

Exhibition curated by Lucasen Brown.

All are welcome to join us for an opening reception for this art exhibit on Wednesday, October 8 at 5 p.m.

We are excited to announce that the ISM will be linking its exhibitions to the Smartify app. The app is available as a free download from the App Store and Google Play, or you can access content through the ISM's page on Smartify. The Smartify app will allow you to directly scan artworks that are on display, as well as QR codes that are placed around the exhibition, to receive more information. You will also be able to save your favorite artworks and share them to social media.

Contact: Anesu Nyamupingidza

Art credit: Lucasen Brown, Just Walking Around, Oil on Linen, 2025