Painter and printmaker Elmer Brown was a leading Karamu artist of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Pittsburgh, Brown moved to Columbus, Ohio, at an early age. After a series of family disruptions, the teenaged Brown became a vagrant. During his wanderings, he began to draw thing, with a piece of coal, a pencil stub, or chalk, on sidewalks, walls, or freight car doors. In 1924 he was put on a chain gang for illegally riding freight trains, an experience that gave him a “sudden and harsh maturing”. After moving to Cleveland in 1929, he associated with the art and theater departments of Karamu House, working as an actor and stage designer. He attended the Huntington Polytechnic Institute in Cleveland, 1933–34, on a Gilpin Players scholarship supplied by Karamu. Brown exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1934–43). In 1936 he joined the Cleveland theater project of the Works Progress Administration, working in scenic design. He later worked in the departments of graphic arts and sculpture-ceramics of the WPA. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, under the auspices of the WPA Ohio Art Project, Brown painted three murals for Valleyview Homes in Cleveland, a federal housing project. He exhibited with other Karamu House artists in New York City and Philadelphia (1942). Also that year he received two major commissions: one from the Men’ s City Club of Cleveland to paint a mural on the subject “freedom of expression” and the other from the U.S. Army to create patriotic illustrations to be displayed in segregated accommodations for African-American soldiers serving in World War II. In the late 1940s he taught at the Cooper School of Art, a commercial art school under private operation in Cleveland. In 1953 the American Greetings Corporation hired Brown as the first African-American illustrator on the staff, and he worked there until his death.
Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 224