Marshall Brown is an artist and architect whose large-scale collages give form to the interactions between architecture, power, and acts of world-making. Invested in the material history of architecture, he appropriates images by artists and photographers who take the built world as their subject — dismantling and reconstructing them into new spatial and pictorial arguments on prepared panels and archival paper. Two bodies of work define the current practice: Palaces of Industry, built from pure abstraction in the Suprematist and Constructivist tradition; and Prisons of Invention, constructed from reality’s ruins in the lineage of Piranesi’s imaginary dungeons.
Brown’s work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago. Solo museum exhibitions include SFMOMA (2023–24) and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (The Architecture of Collage, 2022–23). Brown has exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Arts Club of Chicago, and the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles. He has published two monographs: Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects (Princeton Architectural Press, 2022) and The Architecture of Collage (Park Books, 2022). Brown is represented by Western Exhibitions. He is a Full Professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. Brown received his graduate degrees at Harvard University.