Chicago Tribune
Living Section
July 9, 2010
Roger Brown’s home away from home
By Lauren Viera, Tribune reporter
Roger Brown’s home is like a museum.
No, really: It’s installed for the summer (most of it, anyway) in an upstairs gallery at Hyde Park Art Center.
Brown — who is typically grouped with Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson and other visual artists within the colorful Hyde Park-rooted Hairy Who collective — bequeathed his entire La Conchita, Calif., home/studio to the School of the Art Institute, his alma mater, two of whose associates collaborated on this eclectic installation. Although it’s not as personal a glimpse as I’d hoped, “Roger Brown: Calif. U.S.A.” likely will appeal to those who sneak peeks inside the host’s medicine cabinet at cocktail parties, in hope of gleaning little bits of personality not readily dispensed.
Brown was an eclectic artist, often pairing rather straightforward canvas paintings with installations of collected objects, aptly referred to by some critics as “object paintings.” Canvases lean on shelves that have been painted to match, or provide an illustrative backdrop behind a series of perfectly spaced vases. All of it is deliberate.
Especially in his La Conchita home, which was completed in 1993 after the pack rat artist had run out of space in his Lincoln Park and New Buffalo, Mich., home-studios (also gifted to SAIC), Brown collected and displayed objects either from or representing the Southwest or Mexico. Clay pots, woven blankets, decorative plates, a cactus coat-tree and brightly painted furniture are all arranged here just so, as they were in his home, in a call-and-response fashion way too literal to be the work of an interior designer. Everything complements everything else, from the little series of flowering cacti in the windowsill to the flowers that line the bottom of one of his “Virtual Still Life” abstract landscapes.
Brown is responsible for the pleasant aesthetics, obviously, in the way he placed a kitschy paint-by-numbers still life over a vintage television set, and tied it together with a ceramic lamp (“Television Arrangement). But credit is due curators Nicholas Lowe, who produced the exhibit, and Lisa Stone, borrowed from the Roger Brown Study Collection (aka the preserved Lincoln Park home/studio), who managed to present what must have been an overwhelming collection of objects in a manner that satisfies some behind-the-scenes curiosity with room for the art itself to breathe.