For much of his prolific career, famed Chicago Imagist Roger Brown lived and worked in a converted 1880s storefront at 1926 North Halsted. About a year before the artist’s death in 1997 at age 55, he gave the two-story house to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which opened it for weekly classes, scholarly research and public visits by appointment soon thereafter.
The house closed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 shutdown. It never reopened.
Then, last December, the School of the Art Institute stunned the Chicago art scene with the announcement that it had sold the house’s contents — some 3,000 objects related to his work and career — to a foundation that supports the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis. It later moved to sell the house.
The events set off an only growing swirl of controversy over the fate of the collection and now Roger Brown’s house — and who should steward Brown’s important legacy. Last week, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted unanimously for the property to receive preliminary landmark status, setting into motion a formal landmark designation process.
Against this backdrop comes a new exhibition at the Kohler Center that gives audiences a look of Brown’s visual world and what inspired his cartoonish, folksy style and depictions of semi-imaginary architecture and landscapes. The exhibition, located at Kohler’s satellite Art Preserve and running through spring 2026, shows only a fraction of the newly acquired objects but aims to provide visitors with an introductory taste of the artist’s vast collection, which it plans to fully showcase down the road.
Still, Brown’s friends and fellow artists decry the sale and the loss of what they see as a key piece of the city’s cultural patrimony.
“I’m sure the Kohler will be a respectful and dutiful steward of it, but it’s not the same,” said famed Chicago artist Gladys Nilsson, who was featured in the Hairy Who retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018-19. “They’ve other such collections and have reproduced living spaces, but it’s a shallow feeling for those who’ve had the [good] fortune of experiencing the real thing, and having Roger’s house/collection intact was the real thing.”
Brown was among the best known of the Chicago Imagists, gaining national fame in the 1960s and ‘70s. “You could almost say his work was iconic Chicago, because he portrayed Chicago so often in his paintings, so lovingly but also with a bit of bile,” said Chicago artist Richard Hull, who was a good friend. “He’s incredibly important.”
Hull, who lived next to Brown for three years, called the disposal of the study collection a “tragedy” for SAIC because it was an irreplaceable and easily accessible resource for students and researchers.
According to Lisa Stone, who served as the collection’s curator for 23 years, negotiations were conducted in secret and the announcement of its sale came as “stunning surprise” to her. “They didn’t want any pushback, and they didn’t want any help,” she said.
Hull, who served on a steering committee that helped administer the study collection, said the body was never consulted about the sale. The timing was puzzling, he said, because SAIC had spent money not long before on extensive renovations to the study center, including HVAC upgrades. “They kind of blindsided everybody,” he said.
SAIC declined to make anyone available for an interview, but it released a statement that said it sold the objects to make sure they are “adequately preserved for years to come and remain publicly available.”
The statement also read: “Over the time that the school cared for Brown’s home and especially during this latest renovation, it became clear that an appropriately safe and climate-controlled museum setting would best serve the art collection.”
As for the sale of the iron-front facade house, which it put on the market for $1.175 million, SAIC said the proceeds “of both the residence and collection will support SAIC’s department of painting and drawing, with funds dedicated to Roger Brown Graduate Student Scholarships.”
But the house sale has also stoked concerns in the art world, since the real-estate listing for the property described it as an opportunity to “completely renovate or demolish” the building. (The home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but it was not previously designated a Chicago landmark, so there is nothing to prevent its demolition.) So far, a petition to preserve the house has amassed more than 550 signatures; the Landmarks Commission Oct. 9 vote temporarily protects it.
Brown’s study collection consists of African, tribal and outsider art, works by Imagists and other contemporary artists, international costumes and textiles as well as toys and objects and ephemera of all kinds that Brown purchased in thrift stores and flea markets. Stone, the collection’s longtime curator, said the holding’s artworks, for which appraisals were available, were estimated to be worth more than $3 million in 2018.
According to Hull, such artist collections are a Chicago tradition with other Imagists like Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum assembling similar holdings. In a letter he wrote to Stone in June 1997, Brown said: “I feel the things in the collection are of universal appeal to all artists and people with a sense for the spiritual and mystical nature that material things can evoke.”
The objects were displayed in two stairways and in what had served as Brown’s living quarters on the second floor. “It was all exactly as Roger left it,” Hull said. “In the beginning, it was a little disturbing for me to go there, because I had spent so much time there with Roger and [his partner] George [Veronda].”
As for the Kohler Arts Center, leaders there saw the sale as a way to keep the holding intact and allow it to remain within a 150-mile radius of Chicago. The Brown collection also matches with Kohler-owned collections of two other Chicago Imagists: Yoshida and Barbara Rossi.
“So, the idea we could continue to build out that strength in Chicago Imagists and tell that story was really exciting to us,” said Jodi Throckmorton, Kohler’s chief curator.
A portion of the collection is expected to eventually go on view permanently at Kohler’s Art Preserve, a 50,000-square-foot space about two miles away from its downtown museum. The facility, which opened in 2020, houses 32 artist-built environments, essentially immersive spaces that artists created to show their own work or objects important to them.
The Brown exhibition will be shown just outside the Art Preserve space devoted to Yoshida, who was a mentor to the Chicago Imagist. At the same time, Imagist works from the Brown collection and other parts of Kohler’s holdings will be temporarily featured in the Yoshida space.
According to Laura Bickford, a Kohler curator who oversees the Art Preserve, the show is meant to be an introduction to Brown and his study collection. She also sees it as a lead-in to a much larger exhibition expected to take place in three to five years, one that could combine elements from the museum’s Brown, Yoshida and Rossi holdings.