Aug 27, 2021
Bil Brown is a lens-based artist living and working in Los Angeles. Whether working in portraiture, fashion, or photojournalism, Bil’s imagery captures energetic moments of the conscious world, as well as the foreboding of what is to come. Often using his work as a platform for advancing ideas, social-change, and excising historical reference addressing current events, Bil pushes the boundaries of his visual storytelling as a “concrete-poetry” infused with empathy for our current cultural milieu.
Bil’s still photography has been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows. His 2018 show at the Leica Gallery LA, PROTEST, documented the protests following the 2016 election of an American President. In 2020, during the global pandemic, Bil started a teaching series with Leica Akademie entitled Fragments Toward the History of Photography and plans on publishing a series of short run books covering the time leading up to and during the tumultuous 20th year of the 21st Century.
Originally a writer, Bil is an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School where his teachers included co-founder Allen Ginsberg. In the late 1990s Bil co-founded the Prague School of Poetics, which received grants from the Rockefeller Center, the NEA and Arts International. The school supported, published and ran community projects for artists and writers in Denver, Louisville, New York, Chicago and Prague. In 2000, The Prague school put on the summer festival of international arts Prazska Skola Poetiky. The festival focused on the relationship of the Avant Garde between the Americas and Eastern Europe. Participating artists included Czech Surrealists Jan and Eva Svankmejer, Lydia, and Czech photographer Josef Koudelka.
Bil lives in Los Angeles, CA with his family and often travels to Europe and Asia, and across the Americas.