The second president of the New York Society of Women Artists (NYSWA), Sonia Gordon Brown worked as a sculptor, mainly of portraits. She studied with Valentin Seroff and Alexander Andreeff, and in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle. In the late 1930s, Brown suffered a severe stroke, leaving her speechless for the last 30 years of her life – an extremely frustrating condition for a woman who once spoke Russian, English, and Italian. Although she was initially institutionalized, she found independence by selling her work. Beginning in the late 1930s she actively exhibited with the Sculptor's Guild, showing mostly her large scale, heroic works. Brown lived in Italy during the last 15 years of her life without any communication with her family.
