Tommy Brown: The Significance of Moments

Brown says his medium is the visual reality of rural America. He employs the surroundings where he lives as his creative source and moves as freely around with his camera as a painter would manipulate paint. “Painters talk about making their best work when their mind stops thinking and they reach a place where it’s just doing. The noise of the everyday disappears and the thinking stops,” he says. “I can remember making every picture in this show and each one involved a similar experience. The picture presented itself and I just needed the wisdom to see and record it properly.” Brown, Colgate ‘78, received his MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art and has been making photographs for 40 years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of Colgate’s Picker Art Gallery, Munson-Williams Proctor Art Institute, Beinecke Rare Books Collection Yale University, Colby College Museum of Art, The Parrish Art Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Lightwork Collection Syracuse University, The Museum of the City of New York, and private collections.

A Colgate Bicentennial event
Located on the first floor of Little Hall, the Clifford Art Gallery presents approximately eight exhibitions a year. A teaching gallery, all exhibitions are selected by Colgate’s art and art history faculty to provide examples of work executed in a variety of media that demonstrate issues originating in the academic curriculum. 

The Clifford is free and open to the public from 10:30am until 4:30pm on weekdays and from 1 until 5pm on weekends.

Founded in 1819, Colgate University is a highly selective, residential, liberal arts college enrolling about 2,900 undergraduates. Situated on a rolling 575-acre campus in central New York State, Colgate attracts motivated students from around the world with diverse backgrounds, interests, and talents.