Roger Brown Fine Art Prints for sale

Roger Brown

Roger Brown was born on December 10, 1941. He was raised in Hamilton and Opelika, Alabama, where he grew especially close to his grand and great-grandparents on both sides of the family. Brown’s interest in art emerged in grade school; he took art classes from second to ninth grade, and won first prize in a statewide poster competition in tenth grade. After graduating from high school in 1960 Brown attended David Lipscomb College in Nashville, a school associated with the Church of Christ, where he briefly pursued an interest in becoming a preacher. In 1961 he decided to attend art school, and in the fall of 1962 he moved to Chicago where he first took classes at the American Academy of Art before enrolling at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His first experience at the School was brief, and in 1963 he returned to the American Academy of Art, where he completed a commercial design program in 1964. He then returned to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full-time student from 1965-68, and 1969-70, where he committed to fine art focus that he would pursue with great intensity and originality for the next three decades.

During this time Brown was engaged in the emergence of an energetic period of art-making in Chicago which became known as Chicago Imagism. Inspired by instructors Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, works by Roger Brown and a number of fellow students were initially recognized and supported by curator Donald L. Baum, who organized influential exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Encouraged by Whitney Halsted, Brown and his colleagues began to look to the work of self-taught artists, visiting Joseph Yoakum, Aldo Piacenza, William Dawson, Lee Godie, and others, responding to their works with a spirit of visual and intellectual curiosity and genuine respect, and ushering them inside the cultural arena, not to an outsider realm. In 1970 art dealer Phyllis Kind first exhibited Brown’s work, beginning their strong relationship as the exclusive representative and ardent supporter of his work for his entire career.

In 1968 Brown received his BFA and in 1970 he was awarded his MFA, both from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With his MFA Brown also received Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship, which supported travels throughout Europe and Egypt, where he collected objects, images, and inspiration. Travel was to figure prominently as a source for subject matter throughout Brown’s artistic career. In 1972 Brown was featured in the book Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945 by Franz Schultz. Also in that year Brown began a close relationship with architect George Veronda, and at this time architecture and landscape became integral themes in his work. Brown‘s mediums eventually included sculpture of found, assembled, and painted objects, theatre and opera sets, and mosaic murals, in addition to painting and printmaking. In 1979 he designed sets for the Chicago Opera Theatre’s production of Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte, and in the same year he began planning and construction of a residence and studio in New Buffalo, MI, designed by George Veronda. Veronda was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly after the project was completed, and died in 1984. Brown continued to live in the award-winning New Buffalo residence, while maintaining his home on Halsted Street in Chicago, and eventually moved to Ventura County, CA where he commissioned a residence and studio by Stanley Tigerman.

In 1996 Roger Brown gave his New Buffalo residence and studio to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to provide an artist’s retreat for the School’s faculty, and later he gave his extensive collection of art, art books, slides, ephemera and archival materials to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for use as an artist’s study collection (the Roger Brown Study Collection). The collection contains over one thousand works in a variety of mediums and from diverse categories, reflecting Brown’s personal artistic vision and his insightful responses to the visual, material world around him. Roger Brown expressed his motivation for making this gift saying “...I feel the things in the collection are of universal appeal to all artists and people with a senses of the spiritual & mystical nature that material things can evoke.”

Brown’s exhibition history is extensive. He was represented for 27 years by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York, and his work was shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the country and abroad. Major retrospectives of his work were mounted at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 1980, and at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1987. In September 1997 the mosaic mural “Hull House, Cook County, Howard Brown: A Tradition of Helping,” designed by Roger Brown, was dedicated at the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago. His last solo exhibition of paintings ran from 5 September to 7 October, 1997 at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago. He is represented in many major museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art; High Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Roger Brown’s rich artistic career was at once intensely original and personal, while also exemplifying a significant aspect of Chicago’s art history which has had considerable impact on our art culture, in and beyond Chicago. In addition to his consistent and enormously prolific life as an artist, Roger was deeply involved in the research of his family’s genealogy, tracing his lineage prodigiously, and discovering relationships to Elvis Presley and Tallulah Bankhead within his extensive family tree. Roger Brown passed away on November 22, 1997, and was survived by his parents, James and Mary Elizabeth Brown and his brother Greg Brown.

Copyright to all of Brown’s work is owned by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The School also owns a large selection of his paintings and prints, some of which are offered for sale to museums and private collections. The Roger Brown Estate Painting and Print Collection is represented by Russell Bowman Art Advisory, Chicago.

A selection of solo and group exhibitions includes: False Image, Hyde Park Art Center, 1968; Don Baum Says: “Chicago Needs Famous Artists,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 1969; Chicago Imagist Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1972; Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973 and 1979; Currents 6: Roger Brown, St Louis Art Museum, 1980; Roger Brown, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1980; Who Chicago? An Exhibition of Contemporary Imagists, Sunderland Arts Centre, England, 1980-1981; American Painting 1930-1980, Hause der Kunst, Munich and curated by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1981; An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, 1984; Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade, American Pavilion Venice Biennale, 1984-1985; Correspondences: New York Art Now, Laforet Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 1985-1986; the retrospective Roger Brown, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1987; Word as Image/American Art 1960-1990, Milwaukee Art Museum, 1990-1991; Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992-93; Art in Chicago: 1945-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1996; Beyond the Mountains: Contemporary American Landscape Painting, which traveled to seven venues, 2000-2001; Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Comics in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 2003 and traveling; Roger Brown: A Different Dimension, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and The Chicago Cultural Center, 2004; Roger Brown, Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Indiana, 2004.