Laurie Halsey Brown

Laurie Halsey Brown is an American artist and curator based in San Francisco. Best known for her collaborative projects incorporating urban landscapes, Brown founded, in 2008, the artistic laboratory senseofplace LAB.

Brown earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, studied psychology in New York, and worked in Rotterdam for five years. She taught a course of her own design, “Interdisciplinary Media and Contemporary Society”, at The New School from 2000 to 2012. She has lived in San Francisco since 2007. The work incorporated footage she had taken the day before the attacks.

While living in Rotterdam, Brown created a webcast and poster addressing controversies over squatting in the Netherlands. Brown's series, Honoring Japan's 'sense of place''', includes a triptych that combines a textile with photograph of a crowded intersection that echos the cloth's colors and grid. Another work, also employing juxtaposition of two mediums, combines a photo of people sitting over a canal two abstract watercolors. "When I'm in a place", she was quoted in SFWeekly'', "it's not just seeing one thing—it's a layering of different things, with lots of different elements."

In October 2013, Brown invited four artists, Jeff Hantman, Alicia Escott, Brian King and Githinji Mbire, to create works using debris dumped illegally on the streets of Oakland. The resulting works employed, among other found objects, a truck tire, leather couch, and jawbone from an unidentified rodent.