O Lincoln

A very long time ago . . .

Lincoln contemplates America’s mythic demands of a hero.

Sometime in the future . . .

On a beautiful day, we visit the ruins in DC.

* Teardown, Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 2025, October, 2025

** Carte-de-visite printed from a lost contemporary negative, probably a copy, of one view of the multiple-image stereographic pose made by Alexander Gardner, in Washington, DC, August 9, 1863. Mellon Collection , From The Face of Lincoln compiled and edited by James Mellon with Hero’s Hill** Carte-de-visite printed from a lost contemporary negative, probably a copy, of one view of the multiple-image stereographic pose made by Alexander Gardner, in Washington, DC, August 9, 1863. Mellon Collection , From The Face of Lincoln compiled and edited by James Mellon with Hero’s Hill curio by Kate Browne

*** Lincoln Memorial with full size Hero’s Hill by Kate Browne

On Hero's Hill in the studio

I thought of Vietnam many times while I worked on my drawings, models, ideas around Hero’s Hill.

Partial photo from the book Under Fire was taken by David Burnett, 1971 at a USO concert in Da Nang.

Vietnam was the war I grew up with. My cousin did multiple tours. Older brothers of friends were drafted. A number of times I went with my mother to drop something off at one house or another, and right before she knocked, she would say, don’t say anything, their son was just killed in Vietnam. We saw the war happening on the news, in LIFE magazine. Photographs by Larry Burrows, Catherine Leroy, Horst Faas, and Henri Huet come to mind. I remember the photos, but mostly I remember the stunned reaction of adults. As photo editor, Peter Howe said about Cathy Leroy’s photos, “These are not portraits of a warrior class but of ordinary, frightened, and often bewildered young men trying desperately to stay alive, and relying upon each other to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.”

On Memory

a collective convergence of dry sounds

with Suzanne and Robert Sullivan

Double Exposure Resurveying the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, American’s Most Mysterious War Photographer by Robert Sullivan

Hero's Hill 2024

Photo from summer workshop 2024. Looking for a spot along Route 209 to put up the full size for the summer Upstate Art Weekend 2025.

1/2 size of final piece.

On Memory

There was a mountain near me when I was growing up. I could see it way across a long valley toward the Appalachian Mountains. It sloped slowly up to a point and then curved inward like a “C” and then sloped down at a faster rate. I have seen the same mountain multiple times to varying degrees of height as I got older working on my artworks. I saw it in Hungary while I was standing in a Jewish cemetery in Miskolc, and I saw it once from a second floor window in Villa de Leyva, Colombia.

Always a kind of surprise and memory at the same time, a clashing, strange feeling. Happiness. Humor. And loss. For what is being lost in the present and what was lost a long time ago looking at the mountain.

I hear stories about memory in every place I’ve gone with my artwork, Cocoon. Memory isn’t all sad stories but it’s often about loss. And sometimes awful gaping loss.