KEN BROWN & HIS CARDS AND EPHEMERA
View of Ken Brown’s basement studio, stocked floor-to-ceiling with artworks and a personal collection of novelty whatnots.
There is nothing like the quiet joy of killing time in a bookstore. Whether between plans or caught in the rain, if there's a bookstore nearby that’s where I’m headed — especially if it’s secondhand. The smell of different types of paper, the soft shuffling through narrow aisles, for some reason I’m instantly relaxed. To avoid overriding that peaceful feeling with the inevitable tension of wanting to buy books I can’t afford, I’ll sometimes restrict myself to browsing the card section.
One of my favorite things about secondhand bookstores is that their postcards are usually vintage, used or secondhand as well. I love reading lost notes from cross-country travelers dating back to the ‘30s or ‘40s. Recently, I found myself doing just this at East Village Books, where I was idling after enjoying a snack from Dunwell Doughnuts (located across the street). Tucked into a box of early twentieth-century correspondences, I discovered a huge stash of Ken Brown’s cards. What caught my eye, in particular, were these black and white illustrations labeled “Form & Food Series”. When I investigated, I discovered a fantastic archive of absurd, pun-happy scenes focused around domestic life, travel and politics. The odd, clever content of the original cards led me to believe that they must have been a contemporary addition to the vintage card bin, but I was very wrong!
Ken Brown is a New York City-based artist who has been working with photographs, cartoons and digital collages to create postcard designs since 1975. In his early twenties, Ken shot video footage on a Super 8, creating psychedelic visuals that were played in tandem with light shows at the Boston Tea Party, a popular live music venue from the late ‘60s that regularly hosted the Velvet Underground when they were just getting started. Around this time, Ken met his wife Lisa, and together they hatched a dream of moving to NYC. Before the move, they decided to take a cross-country trip and explore the sights and spectacles of middle-America. When they returned, Ken started to experiment with printing black and white photographs onto postcards.
When I reached out, Ken was surprised by my interest in writing about them, noting that the “Form & Food Series’ was published in the ‘80s! He offered to meet and chat over coffee and “scone research” in Tribeca, the neighborhood where Ken and Lisa have lived in the same apartment for nearly 35 years, which he regards somewhat literally as a “house built on cards.”
The area of Ken’s studio where individual card orders are assembled while sitting upon an oversized Campbell’s soup can.
Over the years, the style of Ken’s cards have shifted and evolved with the emergence of new technologies and trends. Possibly more recognizable to some are his vivid, colorful, digitally-collaged card designs that were popular in the ‘90s and ‘00s. After circulating more than two million cards internationally over the course of several decades, Ken’s last postcard designs were published in 2007. We talked a bit about the obvious culprit responsible for the postcard industry’s decline, the world wide web. However, Ken doesn’t hate the internet! In fact, he is an avid Instagram user, posting consistently twice a day and blogging once a week. The troves of visual content in his archives make it easy to do so.
Modeling “Down at the Diner with Betty” and “Catch of the Day” from the series called “Your Head Here”.
Eventually, Ken branched out and began printing onto “anything you can put an image on”. His storage unit is filled floor-to-ceiling with not only cards, but also wrapping paper, T-shirts, mugs, rubber stamps and large interactive cutouts called “Your-Head-Here’s.” The “Y.H.H.” project was first designed for an MTV special and is a collaboration between Ken and his wife Lisa Crafts. Together, they have created visual work/animations for media outlets such as Sesame Street, VH1 and more. Although we had a nearly three-hour-long chat as I rummaged through his cards and collected ephemera, my favorites remain the black and white illustrations. The more of them I saw, the more I became obsessed.
It bears noting that these particular cards are not available for purchase anywhere, and may only be scoured for online and in unlikely bookstore bins. For now, enjoy the bizarre world of these selected standouts:
