An Interview with Sculptor Manuelita Brown, by Annika Feng
Manuelita Brown
Manuelita Brown
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Ms. Manuelita Brown is a vivacious elderly woman whose main work is with figurative bronze sculptures. Her training and talent combine to create exceptionally personal artwork. She has been a member of the Black community of San Diego for multiple decades, leading other female artists of color toward recognition in the wider neighborhood.
I was privileged enough to interview Ms. Brown on July 17, 2024, about her career, life, and contributions to San Diego to date. In my interview with her, she came across as passionate and interested.
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I was wondering about your cultural background and what inspires your art?
The art that I've done over the last 20 some years has largely been sponsored or inspired by family members. I'm interested in people's everyday lives, so I have pregnant women, I have other things that are inspired by the family. But then there's also some historical characters that I've done obviously, and because the medium that I've chosen, bronze, is quite costly to do, I also have to be concerned about having commissions or sales mostly to be able to do the next work.
In terms of my background, my parents were both Virginians and I was born in Virginia in my paternal grandfather's home. My grandparents were both farmers, essentially, you know, not big farms, but family farms. And my father was a taxi driver or chauffeur; for a time he was a private chauffeur but then mostly he was a public chauffeur, meaning a taxi driver. My mom was a homemaker.
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You mentioned your background in Virginia. What city did you grow up in, or was it a smaller town if your grandparents were farmers?
Well I was born in my grandfather’s home, and that’s a little place out in the country called Warm Springs, Virginia. But I grew up mostly around Metropolitan Washington, DC, in Virginia most of the time. When my father passed, my mother moved with her three daughters, and I'm the eldest, to Washington DC which was also nearby. But I finished high school in Virginia.
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Do you think your cultural background influences the societal issues or the historical figures that you choose to cast?
Absolutely it does, yes. Had I grown up as a Native American on a reservation, that's what I would be mostly interested in. But having grown up in the South, even though some call it the “Up South”, I am interested in the lives primarily of African Americans, but as it relates to all people, not some exclusive experience because there really isn’t an exclusive human experience. I think when you're in any society people have mostly the same issues growing up, regardless of what ethnic group they’re growing up in. Every woman is worried about her children and then her grandchildren and it has nothing to do with where you are or who you are. It seems to be pretty common.
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Would you be able to tell me more about your personal family? You have two sons?
Yes, I have two sons. The elder one has schizophrenia and is living on his own, unsheltered. He was for a while living with us, and decided to move out, but fortunately he's local enough that we occasionally see him. He's more recently begun to communicate with us through texting, etc. I texted him and he just texted back, “I’m okay”.
The other son is a history professor and he’s also an alum of UCSD. He went to graduate school at Duke University, where he met the woman who is now his wife, and they have two daughters so we have two granddaughters. He is now a professor of history at Harvard University. They live in Massachusetts. They come to visit, but they don't live close by, that’s for sure.
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Do you think that you're having two sons, having children, has changed your art or the pathway of your career?
Well, my personal career is in two phases. When I went to undergraduate school, I was interested first in being an engineer, but I was interested in civil engineering. I liked to build things which is also maybe part of why I'm a sculptor now. But there was no engineering department and I had a scholarship for that school. That was the only option. It was a segregated college, Virginia State College, and it had no engineering department. So I looked at math and physics and decided on math. So I graduated with a degree in math. Halfway through college, I married, and we moved to Oregon. I finished my undergraduate degree at Oregon State University.
I was teaching for a good long time. I taught mathematics starting out in middle school and high school. Then I was an academic support at UC San Diego, working with students taking calculus or differential equations. That program was the beginning of having workshop programs on campus where people would come and study together, which is still there through OASIS and through some of the other departments and programs.
Then I decided to switch completely to doing art, so I retired from the university. I was working at UCSD at the time and so for the last 25 years have just been doing art.
Being a mother actually very much influences my art because if we were to look at things that are on my website, America's Son is one of the pieces on my website which is actually a portrait of my younger son. He was quite a bit younger than he is now, so that was actually done shortly after he graduated from undergraduate school. Then there is a sculpture called Happy Face which is my second granddaughter. My son has two daughters, so now I have two granddaughters. The other one is called Newborn which is the first granddaughter. There was the one of a mom talking to her belly, her baby in the womb, called Promises, and that is based on my daughter in law when she was pregnant.
Actually there are two pregnant women in my sculptures. One is called Blooming and the other is called Promises. Both of them were based on my daughter-in-law when she was carrying babies. There's one called Daddy's Angel which is basically a remembrance of my father carrying me but I used my elder son as the model for the man. So I can't get away from the fact that a good portion of my art is related to family, either my children or my grandchildren, those sort of things.
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Promises
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Are those poems on your website, poems that you have written personally?
It's very kind of you to call them poems. When you're working on a sculpture, it's time consuming; it's something that you spend a long time working on. So a lot of times those words came to me while I was working on the sculpture and I wrote them down. You see some of them might not have very much written on them because I might not have had words come to me.
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In one of your other interviews you mentioned that you prefer life-size sculpture. Tell more more about why you prefer life-size sculptures to monumental scales.
If you stand in front of a sculpture that is three times the height or four times the height of a normal person, I don't think you relate to it in the personal way that you would see the sculpture eye to eye and see the face of the sculpture. I prefer the life size as I think it's more relatable. For example, Sojourner Truth, which will be back on campus, it’s in storage right now under construction, but there's pictures on my website of that, it seems to me that if it's exactly the size that the person was, the model, then you have a very visceral understanding that it was a real person and not just a figment of your imagination.
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The Triton sculpture is larger than life, about 8 ft tall. Is that because it is an earlier work of yours, or is that because Triton is a representation of a god?
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It's neither! It's because I was working with a committee that represented students, staff, and faculty. When I did the proposal for them, it was not that big, but in conversation with them, as the artist who was trying to work with a group, you have to pay attention to what the group wants. The fact is that my very original one would have been a little bit larger than life because it is an imaginary figure but it's not a real person. At the same time, I would have made the person a little bit younger, the person's body, but they were very specific that they wanted him to have more muscle. They wanted him to represent a superhero kind of thing. When you're working in response to this committee, you need to listen and try to incorporate their vision and mix it in with your vision. It was a collaboration between students, staff, and faculty, right, and you know the collaboration is always when they're holding the purse strings and you're depending on their funding to do the job then you collaborate. You can't be an obstacle to them getting what they need.
The end result is an amalgamation of multiple people envisioning a sculpture, an art piece, for campus. The campus is so diverse here in San Diego; it's nice that the sculpture can represent a wider selection of views.
At one time, the Triton was on the UCSD ID card. I don't know if it still is.
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UCSD Triton
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You do a lot of work to support the Black community at UCSD, specifically the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund.
It was founded by an alum who was a dentist for years, Dr. Lennon Goins, and while I was working on campus, I started working with him recommending students for the scholarship and that sort of thing. When he left this area, I became the chair of the fund. Once proposition 209 passed in California, we had to move that fund so that it was private and not at the University. It's now situated at the San Diego Foundation, one of the larger scholarship programs that they have. And I am no longer the chair after 20 something years, I am the chair emeritus. The new chair is very competent, energetic, and aggressive, and moving forward they have a campaign now to increase the endowment so that it supports the number of students that we want to support for 4 years.
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What advice would you give to the recipients of your scholarship fund or young Black students in general?
Basically it's the same advice I would give all students. Take advantage of the opportunities that are presented before you. Be diligent. Take care of yourself both emotionally and physically. You can't do your best if you are sleepy or hungover, or you simply cannot be your best or do your best unless you are taking care of yourself physically and emotionally. When I was on campus working with students, together with my husband who was a faculty member in the biology department - I have a big connection to the university both a faculty member husband who is now retired and a son who was an undergraduate there, and I worked there for a few years as a student - I knew you just have to be prepared, you just can't fall asleep at the wheel, you have to participate in the campus at large. When you're paying your tuition, you should be using all of the accouterments offered by the University.
Universities are doing better these days with targeting resources toward particular populations. UCSD now has a Tribal Resource Center for Native American students, for instance.
It's important to acknowledge people and their heritage, because if you don't acknowledge them, you're left out of what's going on. There are so few Native Americans at the University and you won't get more, unless you make the ones who are there feel comfortable to be there and that it's a safe place to be. You can't recruit people if they have the feeling, the past experience, that it was an unsafe place for them.
I think universities are also doing better with first generation students, that population, as well.
Now my particular concern is when they stop. Especially with populations that are significantly underrepresented in any location, it's great to deal with the first generation, but you haven't created a pipeline, if you will, if you stop. So you support the second generation because it's important there too.My grandchildren, well as far as they’re concerned, schooling includes going to college. They don't think about it but they're the fourth generation so by the third generation you've probably established a precedent that this is part of going to school. Finishing college, or a professional school, or a trade school - you don’t just stop because you can read now because there are more things you need to learn to do. My mother as an adult went to college, so I’m the first one in the family who got a degree but my mother also did night school kind of things. My son has a PhD, his dad, my husband, has a PhD and I almost got a PhD, and at one point I realized I don't want to do the research so just send me a master's degree in the mail, and I’m perfectly happy. Then you hit my son's children and they expect to go to school, to go to college, and now my son's eldest is at Barnard in New York. The younger is in high school but she's already talking about where to go to college.
The scholarship with the Black students, we don't care, well we want to support students who are the first generation to college obviously, but we will support second and third generation students as well. We want to establish that pattern in society in general and it doesn't just happen in one generation. It takes three or four generations to establish the patterns, past just the first generation. The first generation is an anomaly if the second generation drops out of high school or doesn't finish their education. Support makes a difference for the second generation as well.
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Is there anything else that you would like to say about San Diego or UCSD or being Black in San Diego? I want to give time for you to say something if you have an urge.
I live in Encinitas and we've been up here in North County the whole 50 plus years I've been in San Diego County. When I first moved here, if I saw an African-American person in the grocery store, I would change anything I'm doing to get to the point where I could say, “Hi, how are you, do you live here?” so that we could meet each other. Fortunately that doesn't need to happen as much anymore because there are enough Black people in the area even if it's still a very small number. And there are people working in the area who don't live here because it's awfully expensive to live in Encinitas. At least you see more people that look like they could be part of your personal family. Of course, my family is pretty diverse so a lot of people could look like they were in my family. My daughter-in-law is Indian and I have a cousin whose wife is German and my mother has the maiden name Fitzpatrick so it's clear we have European ancestry as well as African. But it's still comfortable when a Black person sees other Black people in the environment and I would imagine that the same would be true if I was a Native American and never saw anybody else who seemed to know anything else about me.
Even my grandkids, they're the only Black students in their classes. I can remember when my older son came home and someone was teasing him because he didn't have straight hair. And so it can be a challenge.
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Who gave you a lot of support in developing your career as an artist?
The number one person would be my husband, because I made a lot of changes in what I did and how I did it and he was very supportive of all of that. Even though I created separate bank accounts for the artwork, so that I didn't mess with the family budget, there were times back then I needed funds to do the whole piece of Sojourner Truth and we hadn't received the funds yet from UC San Diego, and he provided the funds for that. Of course, once they paid me, then I paid him back, but my husband supported me financially, emotionally, and time-wise throughout my career as an artist.
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Sojourner Truth
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The interview was edited for clarity. Visit Manuelita Brown’s website at https://www.tsahaistudio.com/ to see more about her artwork and notable life moments.
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