Christopher Brown (b. 1951) is a painter and printmaker whose figurative works explore memory, perception and the shifting boundary between representation and abstraction. Born at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and raised in Ohio and Illinois, Brown earned his B.A. from the University of Illinois before receiving his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, in 1976. Brown frequently draws imagery from photographs and personal memories, recombining figures, landscapes, architecture and repeating patterns into scenes that appear familiar yet psychologically ambiguous. Rather than faithfully reproducing a remembered event, he alters scale, perspective, color and spatial relationships, allowing memory to become a starting point for invention. From 1981 to 1994, Brown taught at the University of California, Berkeley, serving as chair of the art department from 1990 to 1994. His work is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.