KS Art is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Freddie Brice (1920-1998). This is the first solo exhibition in ten years of this recognized outsider artist who lived and worked in New York City. Freddie Brice’s plywood panels are painted in mainly black and white with an urban minimalism and immediacy. Depicting animals, interiors, clocks, watches and jewelry, they reduce complex forms and groupings to their graphic essence, interchanging black and white and positive and negative. As contemporary artists continue to look at outsider art for inspiration Brice’s raw painting style finds a renewed relevance in the work of painters such as Joe Bradley, Chris Martin and Donald Baechler.

Also included in the exhibition is a newly restored video of the artist at work, “Freddie Brice Paints Two Paintings”, made in 1990 by Les LeVeque & Kerry Schuss. In this video, Brice completes two paintings. While demonstrating his rhythmic painting style, he sings and speaks in a poetic verse about painting, hobbies and life.

“It’s in my way of drawin’. It’s in my conscious of drawin’. It’s in my mind. It became to be lovely to me. It became to be likely to me. Why, I like it more than I like anything else. I think it’s a hobby. You know, speaking about a hobby. A hobby is a true thing… When you begin to love something; when you begin to do something, a constructive, something that you like and love, it becomes a hobby. It becomes regular. It becomes continuously. It becomes outrageous. It becomes magnificent. It becomes to be something that you like to do for a hobby. And I like to do drawing for a hobby. I like to do drawing because I get understanding of what I’m doing. It gives me understanding of talking. It gives me understanding of books. It gives me understanding of drawing and hearing what I listen to. It gives me time, it gives me patience and it also gives me ability. Ability is when you gain what you’re doing, and when you get enough of it you begin to have rehability…rehabiliteality of what you’re doing. It becomes a whole lot to you. Drawing is rehabiliteality to me. I began to do it often and I began to do it much. And it’s ability. It’s rehabiliteality of what I love. And it’s a hobby.

-excerpt from video

Freddie Brice was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1920, and at age 9 moved to Harlem, where later he spent much of his time at the Apollo Theater, a fan of acts such as: Diana Washington, Chuck Webb and the Inkspots to name a few. Brice held numerous jobs including an elevator operator, a laundry worker and most importantly at the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard, where he painted ships. After a long history of incarceration and institutionalization he started making paintings in 1983 at an art workshop on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. In 1991 Brice’s work was featured in the exhibition “Art’s Mouth” at Artists Space curated by Connie Butler. Freddie Brice’s work is in the collections of: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Museum of Art and The Old Dominion University, Gordon Collection, Norfolk, Virginia. Additionally Brice’s work has been exhibited at The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, VA and Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee WI. He died in New York in 1998.