Chicago, IL - Roger Brown Home and Studio - 36x28

Art Type: Archival Pigment Ink Photograph
Frame Style: Wood Frame
Frame Size: 36"x28"

Works are framed for the highest quality possible. Each print is hand signed.

1926 N Halsted St
Chicago, IL 60614

41°55'00.6"N  87°38'55.4"W

Roger Brown Home and Studio

Roger Brown (1941–1997) was a central figure among the Chicago Imagists, the loose cohort of School of the Art Institute graduates who, starting in the late 1960s, turned away from New York's cool conceptualism toward something more narrative, vernacular, and unmistakably Midwestern. Brown's visual language — silhouetted figures, nocturnal skylines, theatrical framing devices, and a folk-art sensibility drawn from his Alabama upbringing — gave him a way to take on politics, disaster, religion, and ordinary Chicago life in the same bold, graphic terms. Represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York for more than two decades, his paintings entered the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Met, and his restless collecting of folk and outsider art helped define how a generation of Chicago artists thought about regionalism and identity in American painting.

Brown lived and worked at 1926 N. Halsted Street in Lincoln Park from 1974 until his death, converting the 1888 storefront building into a combined home, studio, and informal gallery for his own circle. He willed it to the School of the Art Institute as a study collection, but SAIC closed it to the public in 2020, and in 2025 quietly listed it for sale — reportedly as a possible teardown, after a developer agreed to buy it. A rapid preservation campaign followed: the Commission on Chicago Landmarks moved to a unanimous preliminary recommendation within weeks, and in 2026 the building's exterior — including its storefront facade and the faded, hand-painted Daily News sign on its north wall — won full Chicago Landmark protection, securing the site's future even as its interior passes to new hands.

Custom Requests
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