After finishing high school in Alabama, Roger Brown enrolled in Bible school, intending to become a preacher. Instead, a figure-drawing class strengthened his interest in art and redirected his course to Chicago. He arrived just in time to help form the group of artists that would come to be known as the Chicago Imagists. The pieces included in “Roger Brown: Early Work” date from 1968—when Brown began his MFA studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—until 1980, when his critical acclaim was beginning to grow thanks to exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Phyllis Kind Gallery, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, among other venues. What would come to be his signature style can be viewed here in prototype: his silhouetted figures, his flattened and patterned landscapes, his love of theater sets and Art Deco architecture. Several of the early paintings on view, such as “Cave Park” and “Desert Crater,” address the inherent strangeness of geological tourism, depicting antlike shadow-figures converging on ominous outcroppings of stone or an impossibly blue pool of water. Also on view are a selection of sculptures that reveal his love for cultural artifacts and designed objects: “Untitled (Bus)” and “Untitled (Ship)” began as clothing irons, most likely procured by Brown on one of his frequent junk-shopping expeditions to the legendary Maxwell Street Market or other flea markets throughout the city. The irons’ subtle visual similarity to streamlined vehicles of the 1930s and 1940s becomes manifest with Brown’s enameled additions of yellow-lit windows and silhouetted figures, each on their own compartmentalized and solitary journey. (Kathryn Scanlan)
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