Roger Brown
Roger Brown (born December 10, 1941, Hamilton, Alabama, U.S.—died November 22, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia) was an American artist and collector who was associated with the Chicago Imagists and was known for his bright, flat, and seemingly simple compositions that show an ominous, sometimes satirical, perspective on contemporary life and American culture and politics.
Early influences
Brown was raised in Opelika, Alabama, in a religious family that belonged to the Church of Christ. They attended services multiple times a week, participated in regular Bible-study classes, and went to Christian summer camps. Brown’s religious upbringing and his early interest in folk art, Art Deco and machine-age design, and comic strips all later surfaced in his art. He showed a proclivity for drawing early on. He left Alabama for Nashville to attend Lipscomb University (associated with the Church of Christ), where he intended to study to become a preacher, but he eventually rejected that career path to become an artist. Brown left the South for Chicago in 1962 and began studying art, taking a few classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He then studied at Chicago’s American Academy of Art to become a commercial artist, another path he ultimately rejected. In 1965 he became a full-time student at SAIC, earning a B.F.A. in 1968 and an M.F.A. in 1970.
Brown’s years at SAIC had a profound impact on the direction of his art career. While in school he became interested in art historical traditions that would influence his own art making, including Pop art, Surrealism, and pre-Renaissance Italian art. He also became interested in the work of René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe, which he could see firsthand in the galleries of the Art Institute. Brown studied with painter and collagist Ray Yoshida and art historian Whitney Halstead, both of whom encouraged him to look to non-Western and nontraditional artists and art forms for inspiration. Yoshida took Brown and other students to the Maxwell Street Market, a flea market on Chicago’s Near West Side, where Brown began to collect a range of odds and ends and to find source material for his work. He began frequenting thrift shops and antique shops to find materials for his growing collection. Halstead introduced Brown to self-taught artists Joseph Yoakum, Aldo Piacenza, Lee Godie, and William Dawson, a community that Brown supported and associated with throughout the rest of his life. He became a voracious art collector, especially of outsider art, which he found in Chicago as well as on trips throughout the United States, Mexico, Russia, Africa, and Europe. He eventually bought more than 30 works by Yoakum and numerous birdhouses made by Piacenza.
A Chicago Imagist
In the late 1960s critics began to group together a generation of artists who had studied at SAIC, though for the most part their styles were fairly divergent. Thus, Brown became associated not only with the so-called Hairy Who (consisting of Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, Sue Ellen Rocca, Art Green, and Jim Falconer) but also with Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Barbara Rossi, and others. Influenced by Pop art, commercial and advertising art, and comics, the Imagists created, to varying degrees, works that were figurative, narrative, and surrealistic and that butted against the Modernist abstract and conceptual art then dominating the New York City art scene. Those Chicago artists were embraced by curator Don Baum, who over the course of three years (1966–69) organized several exhibitions of the larger group, increasingly known as Chicago Imagists. Among the exhibitions that included Brown’s work were “False Image” (1968) at the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side of Chicago and “Don Baum Says ‘Chicago Needs Famous Artists’ ” (1969) at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).
In 1970 Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind began representing Brown, and she gave him his first solo show at her gallery in 1971. Soon after, art critic Franz Schulze, who coined the term imagists for the SAIC-schooled group, included Brown in his book Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945 (1972), helping that group achieve greater exposure. That same year the MCA held the exhibition “Chicago Imagist Art.” In 1972 Brown also began painting a series of “disaster landscapes,” which portrayed people and nature suffering cataclysmic events. The paintings were the subject of a successful 1973 exhibition at the Phyllis Kind Gallery. Notable disaster landscapes include Tropical Storm, Midnight Tremor, and Ablaze and Ajar (all from 1972).
In 1974 Brown purchased a building on Halsted Street in the Lincoln Park neighbourhood of Chicago that became his primary home and studio. Architect George Veronda, Brown’s companion for 12 years, remodeled the interior to suit the artist’s working, collecting, and living needs. In the late 1970s Veronda designed a second, modernist home in New Buffalo, Michigan (completed 1982), a beach town 70 miles (113 km) from Chicago. Brown divided his time between Chicago and New Buffalo, working and collecting in both places. Once he was living part-time in Michigan, he began to incorporate the natural elements of the dunes, such as in Memory of Sandhill Cranes (1981), a work inspired by crane migration. After Veronda died in 1984, Brown lived in the New Buffalo house full-time for about two years before returning to Chicago.
Brown’s reputation flourished throughout the 1970s and ’80s, partly because of Kind’s expansion to New York City, where she exhibited his work when her gallery opened, beginning in 1975. Brown by that time had mastered a number of media, and in 1979 he branched out into costume and set design for a Chicago Opera Theater production (revived in 1987) of Mozart’s Così fan tutte.
Brown became known for paintings with overtly homosexual imagery and content as well as for political paintings aimed at political figures and contemporary society in general and the art world in particular. In the 1992 silk screen Museum of What’s Happening Now, Brown created a Jackson Pollock-style drip painting; the title may poke fun at the museum establishment’s inability to keep up with contemporary art. Brown’s Presidential Portrait (1985) depicted the heads of Ronald and Nancy Reagan floating in a cloudy or polluted sky above a nameless American town. In paintings filled with graphic imagery and biting titles, Brown also addressed the AIDS epidemic and male sexuality.
California
In search of a place to spend winters, Brown commissioned architect Stanley Tigerman to design a house for him in La Conchita, California. It was completed in 1993, and, after moving in, Brown amassed another collection of art and objects, began gardening and working with bonsai, and painted scenes of his new Southern California surroundings. There he started his Virtual Still Life series of paintings. For those compositions, 27 in all, he appended a shelf to the bottom of the canvas that held objects (usually ceramics from his own collection), lending his paintings a three-dimensional quality.
Legacy
In the 1990s Brown also received commissions for public art in Chicago (Arts and Sciences of the Ancient World: The Flight of Daedalus and Icarus, installed 1991 at 120 N. LaSalle Street, and A Tradition of Helping: Hull House, Cook County Hospital, Howard Brown Health Center, installed 1997 at the Howard Brown Health Center) and in New York (Untitled, installed 1994 at the African Burial Ground). In the year of his death he went back to Alabama to begin planning another home and studio in Beulah. Although he died of AIDS before purchasing the house, his family used the plans he had left behind to buy the house, finish the project, and open it in 1999 as the Roger Brown Memorial Rock House Museum.
Brown enjoyed significant recognition of his work during his lifetime, including two major retrospectives, the first in 1980 at the Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Arts and the second a traveling exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. By the time of his death, he had left his New Buffalo home and studio to the Art Institute of Chicago (in 1995) and bequeathed to SAIC his Chicago collection plus 25 more paintings and his California home and collection. The school then bought his home in Chicago in 1996 and opened it to the public in 1998 as the Roger Brown Study Collection.
Naomi Blumberg