Robert Brady was born in Reno, Nevada, a gaming city known as “The Biggest Little City in the World”. He took a high school craft class that gave him, “that sense of complete control, authorship, and ownership,” which was “a new and welcome experience” ¹, as creating gave him a feeling of powerful independence. Brady graduated from high school at 17 and went right on to college. He was encouraged by his high school art teacher not to follow an expected vocation, but rather to continue his passion in art at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC).

During his senior year at CCAC, he spent six months in Mexico with other teachers and students establishing a foreign campus in the small village of Erongaricuaro. This led him to many junctures in his art that have shown evidence of this experience. After graduating from CCAC in 1969, and immediately being drafted into the Navy, Brady later attended the University of California Davis Graduate Program in art. Davis was well-known for their strong art program and had several notable artists on their faculty, including Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, William T. Wiley, and Roy de Forest – a formidable bank of influencers in multiple media. One can only extrapolate what Brady took from each of these artists, but it is evident he was not limited by material.

According to Maria Porges:

Robert Brady reinvents himself. Yes. But there is a thread throughout the work Porges mentions. He has drawn that thread through differing bodies of work and tied them together so they relate to each other in some way. No matter the medium, the subject matter, the form, or the material, Brady takes it all down to what is essential, what is universal, and what is felt.