Brown Renfro: The Professor. The Student. The Curator. is an intergenerational exhibition centered on the life, work, and legacy of Professor Leon Renfro and the remarkable way his story connects an artist, a family, and a new generation seeking to preserve what came before them.

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Leon Renfro was an artist, designer, educator, and professor whose work explored ancestry, identity, imagination, and surrealism. His creative life extended beyond the studio, including work connected to NASA, before he returned to Texas Southern University to teach. Through painting, drawing, design, and education, Renfro built a body of work and a life devoted to creativity and learning.

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Among the students who passed through his classroom was Houston artist Bruce Brown, who took a design class taught by Professor Renfro. Brown went on to establish his own artistic career spanning painting, murals, portraiture, military art, and public commissions. His work has included art connected to the Buffalo Soldiers legacy and commissioned pieces honoring figures including Zina Garrison and Earl Campbell.

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The connection between Professor Renfro and Brown might have remained a small piece of their individual histories if not for an unexpected moment in 1998. While Avery Brown Renfro’s parents were planning their wedding, her mother introduced her uncle, Bruce Brown, to Avery’s father, LeRon Renfro. When LeRon introduced himself as LeRon Renfro, Bruce recognized the last name and shared that he had taken a design class at TSU with a professor named Leon Renfro. LeRon replied, “That’s my dad.”

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Years later, Avery began searching for the work of the grandfather she never had the opportunity to know. After earning her degree in African American Studies, she discovered how difficult it was to find Leon Renfro’s work and history online. That search became an effort to recover, document, and bring her grandfather’s artistic legacy into the digital age.

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Through family collections and archival research, Avery located artwork, photographs, documents, personal artifacts, and Professor Renfro’s thesis, gradually uncovering pieces of a history that had not been easily accessible to her generation.

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Brown Renfro brings that history together through the work and story of Professor Leon Renfro, the work of his former student Bruce Brown, and Avery’s emerging role as curator and granddaughter preserving the legacy she inherited. Together, The Professor. The Student. The Curator. represent three distinct places within one story: the artist and educator whose legacy begins the exhibition, a student whose own artistic journey continued far beyond the classroom, and a granddaughter working to ensure that the history left behind is not lost.

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At its heart, Brown Renfro is a story of rediscovery. It asks what happens to an artist’s legacy when generations pass, records become difficult to find, and much of a life’s work exists outside the digital world. It also considers what can happen when the next generation chooses to search, preserve, document, and carry that history forward.

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We don’t just hang the art. We carry it on.