Denise Brown’s bio contains so many listings, you would think you were reading about five different women — but it’s all Brown.
As if being executive director of the Leeway Foundation wasn’t enough work, Brown is also co-chair of Bread and Roses Community Fund and serves on the advisory committee of Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, as well as the boards of the newly formed Philadelphia Public Access Corporation, Delaware Valley Grantmakers, the Henrietta Tower Wurts Memorial Fund and Scribe Video Center. She previously served on the board of the Funding Exchange and the Women’s Community Revitalization Project. A graduate of Brown University, she was a film programmer for the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema from its debut until 1998, and has also served as a panelist for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. She delivered the keynote address at the 24th annual National Women of Color Day and was honored by the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. Brown has also been nominated for the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund’s Straight Ally HERO Award.
PGN: OK, I’ll start with the fact that I’ve known you for a long time and until I did my research yesterday, I didn’t know that you weren’t a member of the LGBT community. DB: [Laughs.] Ah! Well, you’re certainly not the first person to say they thought I was gay. Or if they find out I’m straight they’ll say, “But I thought you liked women?” And I’ll say, “But, of course I like women. I am a woman, why wouldn’t I like them?”
PGN: That’s funny. Tell me about the time and the place you were born. DB: I was born in New Jersey, Beth Israel Hospital in Passaic.
PGN: Really? Me too! DB: Stop! How funny is that? Yeah, my mother’s and father’s families all lived in Northern New Jersey. I lived there for the first eight years of my life before my mother remarried and we moved to California. After high school, I returned to the East Coast to go to college. I’ve pretty much been on the East Coast since then.
PGN: I didn’t know you were a California girl. What was a favorite thing to do there? DB: I was privileged enough to grow up in Los Angeles and was near the beach, so I loved to swim, both indoors and outdoors. I loved riding my bike and that sort of thing but I never got into organized sports. I tended to be more involved with artistic pursuits like art class or dance. My favorite thing of all was to read. It’s such a solitary pursuit but I enjoyed it.
PGN: Favorite book growing up? DB: Oh boy. “Pippi Longstocking” comes to mind. I also liked Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. I think I read the whole series. I still like mysteries as one of my guilty pleasures. The pulpier the better.
PGN: I just saw “Pippi Longstocking” on a list of feminist literature for kids or something like that. DB: Well, no wonder I loved it.
PGN: Any pets as a kid? DB: I sort of remember having birds. And a poodle named Little Bit and a boxer named Big Boy.
PGN: Any siblings? DB: Nope. Only child [laughs], as far as I know!
PGN: What did the folks do? DB: My father, through a circuitous route, became an academic. His degree was in African politics and he did a dissertation on the decolonization of African nations. After graduate school he became a dean of student affairs at Brown University, which is where I went to school. My mother was a nurse and a homemaker. She also was an artist but as an avocation, not a vocation. She was a wonderful cook as well.
PGN: What was your very first job? DB: My mother had a friend who was a clothing designer, and she trained me to use her knitting machine and help with some of the larger pieces in her designs that didn’t need as much detail as the rest. It was a great first job. What’s funny is that I was one of those kids who always wanted to work. For years I used to beg my mother to let me get a job. I remember her saying to me, “Niecy, honey, I know you don’t understand but once you start working, you’ll be working for the rest of your life.” So I didn’t babysit or dog walk or work any of those things, though I really wanted to. Now I really appreciate it because she was totally right.
PGN: What was a favorite job, not counting Leeway? DB: Working at the International House. I was working with the film festival and Linda Blackaby for about seven years, and I loved that job. It was a job with a framework, but each festival was different. I have the ability to sit inside for long periods of time so I used to watch hours and days of films from around the world to decide what should be in the festival.
PGN: As a film buff, give me your top-two films. DB: Oh! I’m such a critic. I walk out of movie theaters all the time. “Killer of Sheep” by Charles Burnett and “The Apu Trilogy” by Satyajit Ray.
PGN: A favorite moment with the film festival? DB: Being with my coworkers. We did a lot in addition to the film festival, like the Neighborhood Film and Video Project, and one of my favorite things was a series of films I put together called “Blaxploitation and Beyond.” One of our guests was filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles and he was a really gracious and lovely person. And that guy who directed “Putney Swope,” Robert Downey Sr., his son Robert Downey Jr. was interesting. There were a lot of great moments.
PGN: I once got into trouble for … DB: Not calling my mother to let her know I’d be late coming home.
PGN: That’s it? DB: [Laughs.] Well, that one stands out in my mind because I was on punishment for it for six months. Her mode of punishment was to deny me whatever it was that I enjoyed most at that moment — telephone, TV, etc. I’d already been under house arrest for something else and this was the first time I went out. I got involved with whatever I was doing and forgot to call so I went back on punishment. But for the most part I stayed out of trouble. I was usually pretty covert with my stuff. PGN: That’s more like it. I was pretty stealthy too. My brothers were the clods who always got in trouble. I did the same things but kept a low profile. So, we all have multiple personalities; tell me about yours. DB: I’m sort of an extroverted introvert. There’s a quiet, contained, book-wormish part of me, there’s a diva part of me. There’s a young and really curious part of me and there’s a really jaded “there’s nothing new under the sun” side.
PGN: Is that the side that walks out of movies? DB: Ha! Yeah! But then there’s a tender, compassionate side of me. I go through periods where I meditate. One time when I was doing a lot of sitting meditation and study, I remember being on the bus and seeing some woman screaming at her child. I found myself reflecting on the fact that she was doing it because someone had probably done it to her and next thing you know I was crying on the No. 2 bus. That’s when I figured I needed too take a break from meditation for a minute. I don’t know that I want to be that compassionate that I’m weeping on public transportation.
PGN: What was your first awareness of the LGBT community? DB: When I was a child. My mother was very open-minded, and I grew up around a lot of queer and gay folks. It was a time when you gave people honorifics so everyone was aunt and uncle so-and-so.
PGN: As a straight ally, how do you handle it when you hear antigay sentiments? Can you remember a specific incident? DB: Yes. I was just starting to date someone and I’d introduced him to an artist’s music, which he really enjoyed. We went to see her perform and she made reference to her sexuality during her set and suddenly he wasn’t interested in her music anymore. [Laughs.] Needless to say, it didn’t end well. To have been involved with someone who held those views was shocking to me. It just didn’t occur to me that he would be homophobic. I think sometimes I live in rarified space because of the people and communities I normally engage with where it’s never an issue. PGN: Since you’re so involved with folks in the LGBT community, do you get straight-phobic comments? DB: Just those who insist that I must be gay. [Laughs.] I’ve had people ask me if I was sure or, better yet, those who tell me I just haven’t figured it out yet or met the right woman. PGN: Any hobbies? DB: I knit and crochet. I draw and do visually based arts, jewelry-making. I haven’t for a while but for a time I was going on a lot of hiking trips. I’ve been to the Sierras and the Rockies and all sorts of back-country trips.
PGN: What was a magnificent moment? DB: Like a lot of people, I enjoy the city and the luxuries of cotton sheets and cocktails at 5, but the price you pay for being in a pristine environment is that few people get to see the magnificent sights you see when you get out of your comfort zone. The price that you pay for seeing those things is having to sleep on the ground and poop in the woods and putting your food in a tree so bears can’t get it. But I’ve seen wondrous sights like a place in the Sierras called the Emigrant Wilderness that’s spectacular or Mono Lake, which, sadly, because of environmental reasons, is receding but the result is amazing rock formations coming out of the water, and you can take a kayak out between them. Part of the beauty of it is being somewhere where you might not see another soul for days and there’s a sense of privacy and freedom. And the sky without light pollution is unlike anything you’ve seen. There are a few trips I’d still like to make. I’d love to hike in New Zealand. I just need to find a way to get champagne in a backpack!
PGN: Are you with anyone now? DB: No, I’m single. So make sure you get a good picture!
PGN: So what are some of your responsibilities as ED? DB: I represent Leeway at conferences and I’m kind of the keeper of the vision of the organization. I manage the board; I’m part of a national working group of organizations that have similar missions of art and social change; figuring out how to encourage others to support this work; a lot of “time to make the doughnuts” administrative stuff; meeting with auditors; doing accounts-payable stuff; coordinating things with the building. Leeway is privileged to have an endowment, so working with our investment managers, doing strategic planning, HR stuff, you name it. With a small organization like this, the ED does a little bit of everything.
PGN: It must feel great to be part of an organization that gets to hand out money to people and do great things. DB: [Laughs.] Most of the time! No, I do have a great job. It combines the arts and cultural communities with social change and justice. I get to work with really smart and compassionate people. I’m constantly amazed and honored at the work that’s going on, and if my job is about creating space for those things to happen, which I think it is, it’s a fantastic thing to do. I couldn’t have made up a better job for me.
PGN: Do you feel pressure to make sure you keep the vision? DB: Not really; we have a great board and are lucky enough to be fairly well-established. What I feel is external pressure to do more. People love what we do so much, they want us to expand to other cities and take on more. There are a very limited number of organizations that do this kind of work and of those that do, very few support individual artists and concentrate on women and people in the trans community.
PGN: Who’s an artist who moved you? DB: Aw, come on. Way too many to chose from. I’ll go with a current one that’s on my desk right now. There’s an organization called “Mothers in Charge,” which was founded by Dorothy Johnson-Speight after her 24-year-old son was murdered over a parking space in December 2001. They’ve partnered with MamaCITA to do an art installation called “One Year.” They’ve created hundreds of sculptural steel-wire vessels — one for each of the more-than 300 murder victims in Philadelphia in 2012 — in order to examine public apathy toward urban violence. They were partially funded by a Leeway Foundation Art & Change Grant. There’s a reception for it at the Painted Bride Feb. 1. Things like that move me. Or the stories of individuals like Lois Fernandez, who told me about the time when women weren’t able to get mortgages by themselves, so she had to lie in order to buy a house. I also get emails from people who’ve received awards from us who tell us what it meant to them and what they were able to do with it.
PGN: Someone you’d want to interview? DB: That’s funny, I just had to write an essay on who I’d want for a national panel. The person I’d love to get is the writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs, though at 95 she doesn’t travel much anymore so I’d have to go to her.
PGN: So what’s your go-to karaoke song? DB: [Laughs.] I don’t do karaoke but my shower song would be “Moon River.”
PGN: Who would you bring back for one last concert? DB: Hmm. Jimmy Hendricks. That would be fun. [Sings.] Der, dern der … Der, dern der … Foxy lady!
For more information on upcoming Leeway grants, visit www.Leeway.org.
To suggest a community member for “Family Portrait,” write to [email protected].