Jamie Brunson is a painter, teacher, critic and independent curator. She studied painting at the California College of the Arts (BFA, 1978) and at Mills College (MFA, 1983). The pattern-based paintings she produced from 1995 through 2004 were inspired by ornamental motifs that she had seen in her travel to ancient historic and religious sites around the world. Her most recent process-based color field work is informed by her kundalini meditation practice.  

Brunson’s work is represented by Michael Rosenthal Contemporary Art in Redwood City, California and by Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Her paintings are in the collections of the United States Embassy in Doha, Qatar, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, and in the di Rosa Art Preserve in Napa, California.

Brunson has been a visiting professor in the painting and graduate departments at the San Francisco Art Institute and at San Francisco State University; since 2000 she has been teaching painting in the Extended Education program at the California College of the Arts. She also teaches contemporary art survey courses and painting studio courses through the Extension program of the University of California, Berkeley. From 1995 to 2005, she was an instructor at Taking the Leap, a program for visual artists in Emeryville, California. In 2006, she co-founded Art Primer with painter Cynthia Lait. Through Art Primer, Brunson and Lait offer individual coaching, and classes and workshops on professional practices for artists.

As a critic and essayist, Brunson has written reviews and articles for regional and national print publications including Artweek, Art Issues, Artspace, Diablo Arts and Artcoast, and the online publication Stretcher. She has contributed to catalogue essays published by the UCLA Wight Art Gallery and by the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

As a curator, she organized Surface Tension, an exhibition of West Coast pattern-based painting that opened at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland in 2001, traveling in 2002 to the Western Gallery at Western Washington University in Bellingham. In 2004 she co-curated Hidden Order, a group exhibition of pattern-based abstraction, for the Oakland Art Gallery. In January 2006 her work was part of a group exhibition of Baroque-influenced abstraction at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. This year she will have a solo exhibition at Michael Rosenthal Contemporary Art and will participate in a group exhibition at the di Rosa Preserve commemorating the Centennial Anniversary of the California College of the Arts.