Roger Brown (1941-1997) is an American artist and painter. Often associated with the Chicago Imagist school, he is known internationally for his distinctive painting style and intelligent social commentary on politics, religion, and art.
Video Roger Brown (artist)
Kehidupan awal
Roger Brown was born on December 10, 1941, and grew up in Hamilton and Opelika, Alabama. He is portrayed in his formative years as a creative child, a tendency that his parents are said to have encouraged. Brown takes art classes from grade two to nine, and wins the first prize in a state-level poster competition in the tenth grade.
After high school, Brown leaves the South. Though he lives away from his adult life elsewhere, he maintains his relationship with the region both in his artwork and research, and then with his plans to buy "Rock House" in Beulah, Alabama.
Maps Roger Brown (artist)
Influences
During his childhood, Brown was close to his grandparents, especially his great-grandmother, Mammy. This experience instilled an early interest in the origins of his family, then inspired extensive research into his family tree. This research is artistically expressed in a number of paintings that track family relationships, especially "Autobiography in Alabama Shape (Mammy's Door)" and a reference to Elvis Presley, who is a distant cousin.
His education in the southern United States also led to a deep interest in Southern material culture, especially in folk arts and handmade functional objects. From adolescence and adolescence, he takes influence from the aesthetics of comics, theater, architecture and interiors, as well as sleek Art Deco and age machine design. In addition, the influence of religious upbringing in an independent and fundamentalist Church of Christ is formative and lasting.
While attending the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 1962 to 1970, Brown was introduced to various periods of art history and genre, leading to Italian Pre-Renaissance art, Surrealism, American artist Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and Georgia. O'Keeffe, and tribal art from many cultures. Painter Ray Yoshida and art historian Whitney Halstead, both professors at SAIC, also greatly influenced Brown's practice. Both include folk art, popular, and self-taught in the sphere of their teaching, a genre that Brown sustains an enthusiastic interest throughout his life. Other influences derived from Brown's SAIC include the legendary market of Maxwell Street, antiques and junk shops, and amusement parks.
The journey is also a source of inspiration and subject matter throughout Brown's artistic career; experience across the US. where he often traveled overland - and in Mexico, Europe, Russia, and Africa found expression in both his paintings and in his collection.
Brown is known as an ingenious and intuitive collector, a practice he began as a child. His collection inspired his work throughout his career for thirty years. His Chicago collection was retained, as he left it, at Roger Brown's Study Collection from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The RBSC archive contains material from Brown's collection of homes in New Buffalo, MI, and La Conchita, CA.
Collecting
Art and collected objects serve as an important source of material for Brown's work and are an integral part of his practice and discipline. Gathering is a chase owned by many of his colleagues in Chicago, and reflects the collecting sensitivity in Chicago. Brown does not claim to be a curator, but feels that objects will be attracted to such objects, building visual and associative dialogue along the way. The Brown Collection includes the work of many friends and associates including Ray Yoshida, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Jim Nutt, Don Baum, and Christina Ramberg, among others. Brown collects works from a large number of self-taught artists, including 36 works by Joseph Yoakum, Henry Darger's masterpiece, Aldo Piacenza's bird house cathedral, hand-painted texts by Jesse Howard, and many others. Works of art and objects from outside America reflect Brown's travel and aesthetic interest. These include Yoruba twins, Baule masks, Guerrero masks, Hopi katsina, molasses, and many other objects from diverse locations and traditions.
The appearance of these objects is influenced by Chicago Imagist artist Ray Yoshida's display technique, utilizing a simple, densely populated white shelf with large objects. It should be noted that Brown displays all objects in his collection as holding the same value no matter their background or origin. Today the treatment of this democratic object is continued at RBSC, with each object being treated as a museum artifact.
Education
After graduating from high school in 1960 Brown attended David Lipscomb College in Nashville, TN, where he briefly pursued his interest in entering the ministry. In the fall of 1962 Brown moved to Chicago where he took classes at the American Academy of Art before enrolling at the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His first experience in SAIC was short, and in 1963 he returned to the American Academy of Art, where he completed a commercial design program in 1964. He then returned to SAIC as a full-time student from 1965 to 1970, where he committed to artistic focus a way that will lead to a productive career over the next three decades. In 1968 Brown received his Bachelor of Fine Art and in 1970 he was awarded a Master of Fine Art, both from SAIC. With his MFA Brown also received Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship, which supports travel throughout Europe and Egypt, where he collects objects, images, and inspirations.
Initial career
Brown developed a mature visual vocabulary in the late 1960s, with visual themes including silhouette figures, nighttime city views, and theater and interior facades. Encouraged by Yoshida and Halsted, Brown and his colleagues began to see works by self-taught artists, visiting Joseph Yoakum, Aldo Piacenza, William Dawson, Lee Godie, and others. Brown became an excited champion for the validity of works equal to or higher than mainstream works. Exploring and documenting the vernacular art and venue landscape becomes a sustainable pursuit.
Mid career
Brown's first solo exhibition at Phyllis Kind Gallery (Chicago, 1971) began its 26-year representation at the PKG in Chicago (starting in 1970) and New York (starting in 1975). Although affiliated with the Chicago Imagist school throughout his career, Brown's work evolved beyond the indefinite definition of "school". In the early 1970s, he received praise for his paintings on landscapes and city sights as a striking background for contemporary life aspects as well as the series "Disaster" (1972), building paintings exploded, followed by an iconic, flat-landscape landscape procession.
Brown's critical belief grew in the 1970s and 1980s. He became famous for responding to the life of the 20th century through works that dealt with various subjects and problems: natural, architectural and urban landscape, natural and cultural dichotomy, disasters of all kinds, current events and politics, social, religion, and culture popular, autobiographical, personal, and sexual issues, the art world in many guises, cosmology, death, history, mythology, transformation, transportation, and weather. He uses the weather as an allegorical background for greater physical and metaphysical powers that dwarf human effort.
In addition to painting and graphic art, Brown's medium eventually includes statues of objects found, assembled, and painted, theater and opera sets, and mosaic murals. In 1979 he designed the set for the production of the Chicago Opera Theater "Cosi fan Tutte" Mozart.
Chicago Imagists
From the beginning, Brown, along with many of his colleagues, was recognized by curator Don Baum, who hosted a vibrant Chicago School exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center from 1966 to 1971. Brown's work was shown there in the group exhibition "Picture Salah" 1968, 69). From this early HPAC exhibition, a group of loosely related artists were known as Chicago Imagists, a term coined by art critic Franz Schulz (1972). They do not form groups, adopt names, or have shared ideologies, but they work independently of New York's contemporary art trends and incorporate the image of popular culture into their works, albeit less simultaneously than New York Pop artists.
Later career
In the late 1980s Brown adapted his work and collected discipline to Southern California, moving into a home and studio (designed by Stanley Tigerman) at La Conchita, in 1993. Still handling various subjects in his work, Brown creates a thick, serialized works which focused on the California experience, including a series of dreadful clouds, paintings of rose trees and bushes; a series of Virtual Still Life object paintings (27 paintings with shelves projecting holding ceramic objects); and metaphorical exploration of Bonsai, its final order.
In 1991 Brown created two Italian glass mosaic magazines entitled "The Art and Science of the Ancient World: Flight of Daedalus" and "Icarus and the Art and Science of the Modern World: the La Salle Corridor with a Retention Pattern". It is installed in fa̮'̤ade and in the lobby of Ahmanson Commercial Development Company, a subsidiary of Home Savings of America, at 120 North LaSalle St., Chicago. The large-scale mural is the "Big Shoulder City" commissioned by The Equitable for the NBC building at Cityfront Center, Chicago and is located in the west lobby of the 455 North Columbus Building. His third mosaic mural (without title) was a tribute to African burial ground, discovered during excavations to Federal Building Ted Weiss at 290 Broadway, New York City, dedicated in 1995. In September 1997, the mural mosaic "Hull House, Cook County , Howard Brown: A Tradition of Helping ", designed by Brown, is dedicated to the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago.
Exhibition
The history of the Brown exhibition is extensive. He is represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York, and his work is featured in various solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries across the country and abroad. The main retrospective of his work was installed at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 1980, and at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1987. He is represented in many major museum collections including the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Art Whitney, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Art Gallery, Museum of High Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Home
Brown's home, studio and garden in Chicago, Illinois; Buffalo New, Michigan; and La Conchita, California. She is in the process of developing her latest home and studio in Beulah, Alabama at the time of her death. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is home to the personal, professional, and artistic effects of Brown. SAIC operates New Buffalo, MI retreat as a residency facility for SAIC staff and staff. His Chicago collection was formalized into the Roger Brown Research Collection, a museum of houses, archives, and special collections in 1997.
Chicago
In 1974 Brown bought a shop in Chicago in 1926 North Halsted Street, which became his first home, studio, and environmental collection. The house is owned by the Chicago School of the Art Institute and is managed as a Roger Brown Study Collection, a museum of houses and special collections, serving SAIC as an academic source, and open to the public by appointment.
Michigan
Brown commissioned his partner, architect George Veronda, to design homes and studios for the Michigan dune property he bought in New Buffalo, Michigan. The Veronda Pavilion, residence, and Roger Brown Studio and Guest House finished in 1979. Throughout the 1980s Brown split his time between Chicago and New Buffalo, where he collected a collection of both art and objects, and developed a garden.
The pavilions and the studio/guest house are modernist steel and glass buildings tucked into the secluded sand dunes landscape between the Galien River and the coastal path. Parallels can be drawn between the Veronda design of these buildings and the Farnsworth House Mies van der Rohe (Plano, IL, 1950). The Pavilion and Guest House contains furniture designed by Veronda, as well as the Brown collection, including works by contemporary artists, sculptures and tribal textiles, by traditional and self-taught artists, and examples of Brown's own.
Brown's home and studio in Michigan gave him a new source of inspiration that was not available to him in the city: nature and the ever-changing landscape. This is where Brown first experimented with landscape design, surrounded the building with grass and flower plots, and then planted several hundred rose bushes. He also installed statues including large sheet metal crosses, Roman sculpture reproductions, architectural ornaments, sculptures by "Joe the Welder", and other objects.
In 1995 Brown gave his New Buffalo property to SAIC with the intention that it served as a retreat for SAIC staff and staff. The Studio, Pavilion and Guest House have been in use since 1996 by the SAIC faculty and full-time staff, who can apply for a two-week residency through enrichment and faculty leave programs.
In spring 2007, SAIC's Historic Landscape Studio class (offered through SAIC's Historic Sustainability degree program), taught by Carol Yetken, undertook a project to examine the history of New Buffalo's property landscape and create a conservation plan. The New Buffalo facility is used by SAIC faculty and staff throughout the year and is not open to the public.
California
In the late 1980s Brown was looking for a place to stay on the west coast. He found a property in the coastal town of La Conchita, north of Ventura, with the Spartan "Royal Mansion" trailer. In 1993 the home and studio, designed by architect Stanley Tigerman, has been completed. Although he originally planned to stay in the trailer and build a studio next to him, in the final plan, the trailer serves as a guest house. The architecture for the structure of the main house of the studio, which he calls the "Temple of Painting," is conceived as a part of the barn, the part of the basilica, with the Romanesque clerestory, the corrugated roof, and the stucco painted in salmon pink, inspired by the colors of the Mission La Purisima in close proximity Lompoc. An important feature of La Conchita's house - and one specifically set by Brown in all his homes - is the presence of a large white wall so that he can display his collection.
Like other houses, Brown fills this home and garden with collected objects - more than 1,500 in total as he inherits the land for SAIC - referred to in scientific material as his La Conchita Collection. The extent of objects is comparable to other collections, with everything from formal paintings to African objects to everyday objects. But the La Conchita collection can be seen to reflect its California environment, featuring a vast array of nearly 500 objects of ceramics featuring objects by amateurs, regional manufactured goods, and Mexican items by family or studio. The contents and directions of this collection are guided by Brown's own environmental exploration and by the network of friends and colleagues he founded in California, his friend Lisa Cathcart, Director of Casa Dolores, Center for Popular Art Studies of Mexico.
Brown left La Conchita's home and collection to SAIC in 1997. The house has been sold, and many collections have been archived. The Spartan Brown trailer is now at the Jurassic Technology Museum in Culver City, California (along with similar mobile phone residence collections). In addition to Brown's original furniture and decorations, Spartan now also features a series of models depicting different views from trailers made by artists, SAIC Associate Professor and RBSC Curator Nicholas Lowe. Surrounding the trailer at its new location is a reconstruction of part of Brown's La Conchita field. Part of La Conchita Brown's garden is also replicated at Casa Dolores.
Alabama
In 1997 Brown was in the process of developing a fourth home/studio/collection environment in an 1870s stone house in Beulah, Alabama, with a vision of "coming full circle" and owning his Alabama home. This house, known as Rumah Batu, is just 15 miles from the home of her parents in Alabama. Brown first documented Rock House in the super-8 movie as a child. After buying Rock House as an adult, Brown sent all the furniture - the start of another collection - from the carpets, blankets, and examples of his own work to his brother, Greg Brown, to be fitted home.
Brown died on November 22, 1997. The project was completed by his parents and brothers, and opened as a Roger Brown Rock House Museum in 1999. His family adds a collection of Brown objects to the Alabama home after his death, contributing personal artifacts and memorabilia family.
Personal life
Brown is a gay man. In 1972 he met architect George Veronda (1941-1984) and both formed a strong artistic and romantic relationship. Veronda was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1983 and died in 1984.
Roger Brown died on November 22, 1997, and survived by his parents, James and Mary Elizabeth Brown and his brother, Greg Brown.
More
Source of the article : Wikipedia