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3 books match the query 'Brown, Carolyn'

cover of Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham

Chance and Circumstance

Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham

Carolyn Brown

Northwestern University Press, 2009

Carolyn Brown, one of the most renowned dancers of the last half-century, lived at the center of New York's bold and vibrant artistic community, which included not only dancers and choreographers but composers and painters as well. Brown's memoir recounts her own remarkable twenty-year tenure with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and provides a first-hand account of a pivotal period in twentieth-century art.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Brown developed close relationships with musical director John Cage and set-designer Robert Rauschenberg and with Cunningham himself. Brown's memoir reveals the personal dynamics between the reserved and moody Cunningham and the playful and ebullient Cage, as well as the controversial yet undeniably brilliant creativity that resulted when the two collaborated. Brown relates the company's rise from its cash-strapped early years when the group traveled by VW bus to perform in small venues to the 1964 world tour that left the group exhausted but finally brought them large-scale acclaim.
A unique chronicle of the avant-garde's struggle for acceptance, Brown's memoir provides a riveting first-hand account of a little-documented era in modern dance that nonetheless had a tremendous impact on the course of art in the twentieth century.
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cover of TIME: Sojourns in Stone and Light

TIME

Sojourns in Stone and Light

Carolyn Brown

Bridwell Press, 2026

TIME: Sojourns in Stone and Light continues Carolyn Brown’s lifelong exploration of how light, memory, and architecture converge—revealing places not simply as monuments, but as living witnesses to history.

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cover of Tierra Santa: Sacred Beauty in the Americas

Tierra Santa

Sacred Beauty in the Americas

Carolyn Brown

Bridwell Press, 2026

Tierra Santa follows photographer Carolyn Brown into the Americas, from the temple mountains of the Maya and the kivas of the Pueblo Southwest to the candlelit churches of colonial Mexico and Guatemala. Over decades of travel, Brown has photographed wherever people have recognized something holy, whether an ancient plaza open to the sky or a village chapel at the end of a dirt road.

The photographs do more than document. In a bank of flickering candles and a hillside terraced into a pyramid, Brown finds the vitality that many cultures have felt in these places—the sense that earth and sky were already sacred and that human beings have only answered its call. Essays by leading scholars of archaeology, anthropology, and colonial history trace how successive peoples made room for the divine. Brown's own reflections close the book with a pilgrimage through the Sierra Gorda.

Together, the images and essays offer an invitation to look slowly and to notice. Stay with them long enough and these places begin to stir memory and awe, along with a profound sense that the sacred was here long before we arrived and remains, patiently, wherever we're willing to see it.

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