Larry "Poncho" Brown (born December 19, 1962) is an American artist, who began as a sign painter professionally, and has worked in both painting and sculpture. He has also worked as a curator. His work has been shown in exhibitions, television series, and multi-disciplinary art pieces. Early life Larry Brown was born Larry O'Neill Brown, Jr. on December 19, 1962. He received the nickname "Poncho" as a child because he was a fan of the television series Cisco Kid. He earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1984, majoring in graphic design and photography. Career Brown started his career as a sign painter, and opened a sign painting business at the age of seventeen. He describes his first major career step was working with Dick Gregory, who had Brown create illustrations for the advertising of Gregory’s Bahamian diet. As a painter, one of his first major exhibitions was at the Jacob Javits Center. In addition to solo exhibitions, he has also exhibited at group exhibitions, including the Philadelphia Art Exposition and the Chrysler Financial African Festival of the Arts. As of 1996 his work was sold in around 1500 galleries within the US. In 1999 his work was featured in the books Wrapped in Pride and Evelyn and Mercer Redcross's Connecting People with Art: Contemporary African American Art. His artwork has appeared in Upscale, Ebony, Essence, and Jet magazines. On television, his artwork has also appeared on the series Soul Food, The Wire, A Different World, and In the House. Brown has also produced book cover art; his work has been used inside of other books as well; he has produced visual images for dance productions; and his work has been used for festival art for events including the Western Maryland Blues Fest and the Capital Jazz Fest. Brown works and creates is art in Baltimore, Maryland. Brown also curated the Baltimore “MASTERS” Art of the Ancestors, an exhibition that featured the works of deceased Baltimore artists. Recent work In 2014 Brown exhibited as a part of the Jamaican Arts Odyssey programme, and created work for an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In 2015 Brown worked on the cataloguing of the art left by the late artist Carolyn Anne Watts, whose lifelong collection of paintings was not discovered until after her suicide, as a part of his recognition of the role of art