Fern Gillespie
Lurita (LB) Brown, owner of Clinton Hill Simply Art & Framing Gallery, is renowned in Brooklyn for her high-quality custom framing of visual arts.
This year marks Clinton Hill Simply Art & Framing Gallery’s 35th anniversary. However, Brown‘s expertise in visual media predates her career as an entrepreneur.
Although during the 1970s and 80s, she was a corporate sales executive at WABC-TV and 3M, Brown also worked for legendary Black magazine moguls, Earl Graves at Black Enterprise and John Johnson at Ebony magazine. She was an advertising sales manager selling Black culture and images to major corporations.
Both Earl Graves and John Johnson became her business mentors. She admired their entrepreneurial passion. “Earl Graves sat on a lot of boards. I did the foot work and the account work as a manager,” she told Our Time Press. “Whenever he was around his peer group, he would let them know I was coming. He would be the hammer guy. The hard sell guy.”
“Working with John Johnson was fantastic. The man was multifaceted,” she recalled. “He would always say to us, ‘it’s not just about the money, it’s about the people who we represent. This is our culture and we have to take control of it and never let anyone tell you about what we do. We tell them.”
When she first met Johnson in Ebony’s Chicago building, she was amazed. “It was very impressive. There was Black art on the walls on all of the floors,” she said. “I was collecting art then. There were Black master artists on the walls. Wow!”
As a hobby, Brown began selling Black diaspora ethnic posters including Caribbean and Hispanic art posters at art shows, exhibits and trade shows. At that time, both Caribbean and Hispanic multi-cultural posters were more available that Black American art prints.
The success of her sideline job inspired her to explore opening up a poster print gallery. She left Ebony and became an entrepreneur. “The ethnic print market was a small percentage. It wasn’t huge like it is now. A man that I did my framing called me and said he heard that I was opening up a poster print gallery,” she recalled. “He said, ‘are you going to offer framing?’ I said no.
He said ‘If you don’t offer custom framing, and just posters, what’s going to happen is that people are going to buy your posters and come to me for framing.’”
“I never thought about that. I told him I didn’t know anything about framing and wasn’t interested in getting into it. He said, ‘You are the boss. You hire people to do the job.’ I will never forget that. That’s when I realized I had to stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like a boss. “
Since the early 2000s, she’s had display space for early career artists in the gallery. That’s when she started utilizing wood frames for artwork. The gallery began specializing in designing and making wood frames. Early career artists’ original artworks on paper by paint, charcoal and mixed media were framed and sold.
It also is when she became a dealer, representing some of the emerging artists and selling original artwork to customers. “I decided to work with the early career artist, then professionals. I remembered words of wisdom from Mr. John Johnson,” she recalled. “He said: ‘If enough people ask you for a certain thing and you don’t have it, then you need to get that product or tool and sell it because that’s where the demand is coming from.’”
Not only does Clinton Hill Simply Art & Framing Gallery create custom frames for art posters and fine artworks, but also frames a range of objects items encompassing memorabilia to shadow boxes to diplomas. “You get a degree when you graduate from of college. You get it custom framed. You are proud of that,” she said. “Framing is an industry within itself.
It’s not just a structure to hang artwork. But together it changes the value and it also changes how you feel about your artwork if it’s custom framed. Custom framed instills a sense of pride.”
Her customer base in the neighborhood has been changing. It’s also the age of AI artwork. “The Gen Z bunch are the new consumers. They are now two generations into framing. They understand the different levels and different quality of framing. It involves expertise and knowledge,” she said. “Today the business has evolved once again to reflect a younger multi-ethnic buyer for custom picture framing design. Black art on paper from the 1970s and 80s is now considered vintage sales.”
Brown grew up in Queens. Her family members worked in civil service. She is the family’s first corporate executive and business owner. “Affirmative action and being in that era of the 1970s and 80s helped.
There is no doubt that about it. This put me on that path that led me to this journey,” she explains. “I was at the right place at the right time making untested right decisions at each milestone decade. Reaching this 35th anniversary at Clinton Hill Simply Art & Framing Gallery.”
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