Roger Brown exhibition

Comprising a large group of paintings that spans the breadth of Roger Brown's career, the presentation surveys the development of Brown’s production. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery will publish a catalogue featuring two new texts on the artist by Lisa Stone, Curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection, and Dan Nadel, Curator at Large, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, as well as pages from Brown’s sketchbooks that relate to the works on view. This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Roger Brown Study Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Kavi Gupta.

Visual AIDS Artist Member Roger Brown began exhibiting his work in the late 1960s, alongside a group of artists often referred to as the Chicago Imagists. Celebrated for their use of imagery, figuration, narrative, and patterning, these artists pulled from idiosyncratic sources to produce deeply personal and visually diverse work, shirking the cool, stylistic orthodoxies that dominated on the coasts. Brown moved in circles around the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which nurtured the unconventional interests of Brown and his peers. Brown was deeply associated with Chicago during his lifetime: he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970; he kept a series of studios, filled with carefully selected art and objects, from both the vernacular and mainstream realms, that culminated in his building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood; and his instantly legible paintings and objects, replete with silhouetted figures, patterned landscapes, and scalloped skies, rendered in dizzying isometric perspective, helped foster a community of artists that announced Chicago as a viable site of artistic production.