In the 1970s, art critics began using the phrase "outsider art" to describe the work of artists who were self-taught and began their careers without having any contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions.
Some "outsider artists," once discovered, became celebrated, artists such as Howard Finster, whose work is currently being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.
Extend the term "outsider" to collectors and you have Phillip Brown, a Jacksonville pharmacist and art collector. Brown goes one step beyond outsider collector, however. He's an outsider art museum owner.
The Brown Art Museum, also referred to on its website as the Brown Museum of Art and the Brown Art Museum of Spirit Expressionism Peace and Art, is in a two-story house on West Eighth Street, not far from Shands Jacksonville. His museum houses about 1,500 pieces of art Brown has collected during the last two decades. About a decade ago, he bought an old home, renovated it and then opened his museum, "even though I wasn't sure what a museum is," he said.
Brown, 62, came to Jacksonville in the late 1970s after earning his pharmacy degree from Northeast Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana Monroe).
After working for Pic N' Save and Eckerd as a pharmacist, he decided to buy his own business, acquiring the Pearl Street Pharmacy in Springfield. The business struggled for a long time, he said. There was no off-street parking, and customers perceived the neighborhood as dangerous. Brown persevered and eventually built a new pharmacy at the corner of Eighth and Pearl, half a block from the house that is now his museum.
Although Brown will open the museum to anyone wishing to visit, he doesn't get a lot of foot traffic, he said. But his website, www.brownart museum.com, gets lots of hits, he said.
Those who do arrange a visit to the museum by contacting him at the pharmacy - his phone number is (904) 955-0237 - find a house filled with art in every room on both floors. Brown estimated he has 300 to 400 pieces displayed, with another 1,100 to 1,200 in storage.
Some of his pieces are signed by or appear to have been painted by the people Brown calls "modern masters." These include pieces by Pierre Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Winslow Homer. But Brown hasn't been able to authenticate most of these pieces and can't prove they aren't well-executed fakes.
That doesn't seem to bother him. He collects such pieces, he said, not because he is especially drawn to them but because they can attract traffic to his website and his museum, where visitors encounter the works that fascinate him, the pieces for which he coined the term "spirit expressionism."
"That's what I'm good at, spirituality," Brown said.
His museum has many pieces filled with religious signs and symbols, some realistic and obvious, some abstract and clear only to the artist and to Brown.
While Brown is a non-denominational Christian - the church he most recently attended was Mount Olive AME - his taste in religious art seems non-sectarian.
Brown said he sells some art pieces both in his pharmacy and through his museum. But he doesn't consider himself an art dealer. He's a museum director, he said. In fact, he's hoping that he can find a buyer willing for one of his modern masters, maybe his Winslow Homer piece.
"If I can sell this Homer for a few million, then I can move downtown," he said.
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