Driving through Rosebud, South Dakota, on a 1972 road trip, Roger Brown came across an old gas station festooned with murals. A hand-painted sign on the front read “Artists Museum,” while one on the side of the building advertised the “World’s Fastest Scenic Artist.” The photographs he took that day documented the genesis of an idea: it was at this site, he said 25 years later, that he began to think of creating a permanent home, and a name, for his burgeoning collection of folk and fine art and other objects.
“It’s one of the most eloquent thoughts he shared with me about the collection,” she says. “Often, people’s initial response is ‘Oh, look at all this kitsch!’ And it’s not. People can perceive it that way….But from Roger’s point of view, there was no distinction between high and low art.”
Brown said that as a kid he was always collecting things–butterflies, rocks, stamps. But it wasn’t until the late 1960s, when he saw his painting teacher’s collection of folk and primitive art and found objects, that he began to realize “how important involving one’s whole life in visual things is for an artist.” The teacher, Ray Yoshida, and art history professor Whitney Halstead urged Brown and his cohort to take inspiration from non-Western and nontraditional art. Yoshida accompanied his students to Maxwell Street to prospect for “trash treasures,” while Halstead encouraged them to visit Chicago self-taught artists like Joseph Yoakum, Aldo Piacenza, and William Dawson. Brown and other Imagists appreciated–and bought–these artists’ works at a time when few others saw their value.
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Brown finished his MFA in 1970, the same year he first exhibited at Phyllis Kind. After finishing his degree, Brown visited Europe and Egypt on a fellowship, collecting artwork and objects. Travel would become both a lifelong interest and a major source of artistic inspiration: his signature works feature stylized, repetitive patterns of skyscrapers, houses, rolling hills, clouds, trees, often punctuated with figures gesticulating wildly in silhouette.
In 1995 Brown gave both Michigan properties to the School of the Art Institute. He leased the Halsted Street building to Intuit, which used the first floor as a gallery and study center and left the second-floor museum intact, giving occasional guided tours. In 1996 Brown donated the more than 1,000 works of art he’d collected (as well as books, slides, sketchbooks, architectural drawings, and writings) to SAIC; the gift included about 25 of his own works that he’d kept for himself, some never to be sold. He didn’t donate 1926 N. Halsted to the school, but in late 1996 the school bought it from him.
It opened as an SAIC facility in the fall of 1998, featuring the Roger Brown Study Collection, which operates as a museum run by the school’s Special Collections division, and a storefront gallery where students and faculty can mine the collection’s materials and hang exhibits. Students also pitch in with cataloging, maintenance, and conservation tasks as part of coursework or internships. Docent-led tours, given by appointment only, cost $15.
