Roger Brown: Weathervane

Taking a larger scope than that of his fellow Chicago Imagists, Brown distorts the city's iconic architecture against the sublime forces of nature

After briefly considering a career as a minister, Alabama-born artist Roger Brown (1941-97) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and became a member of the Imagists, exhibiting alongside such artists as Ed Paschke and Christina Ramberg. Though Brown's paintings contain the hint of irreverence that became a trademark of the Imagists, his subject matter deals with the tense border between the built environment and the natural world. Playing with shifts of scale, Brown communicates reverence and awe for the power of nature while his perspective on human plight sees a fraught and tenuous future. Featuring 11 late paintings from the 1980s and '90s, Weathervane reflects Brown's clarity of vision as an artist both unafraid to face sociopolitical headwinds and unable to ignore ecological destruction.