Roger Brown Home and Studio secures preliminary landmark

The Commission on Chicago Landmarks has approved a preliminary landmark recommendation for the Roger Brown Home and Studio. Located at 1926 N. Halsted in Lincoln Park, the home and studio is a store-and-flat building constructed in 1888 where Roger Brown had his studio on the ground floor and lived with his partner George Veronda on the upper floor.

Meeting Criterion 1 for heritage, The Roger Brown Home and Studio is significant to Chicago’s cultural heritage as a building associated with the Imagist movement since Roger Brown was a founding member of the Chicago Imagists, and his home and studio is where he created his own Imagist work and where he displayed artwork of other painters working in this movement. 

The Chicago Imagists began as a group of young, idiosyncratic painters who came out of the School of the Art Institute in the 1960s and developed the Imagist movement, a Chicago school of painting that attained national significance between the 1960s and 1990s. The Chicago Imagists rejected Conceptualism and Minimalism, mainstream art movements in the 1960s and sought new directions in art by embracing personal experience, memory and emotion in art. The Chicago Imagists contested New York as the center of the contemporary art world and succeeded in elevating Chicago’s place in the production of fine art.

The Roger Brown Home and Studio meets Criterion 3 for its association with a significant person as it was the place where nationally significant artist Roger Brown created much of his work from 1974 to 1995. Examples of Roger Brown’s work are held in the permanent collections of major American museums and abroad and much of this work was conceived of and created in the home and studio.

The Roger Brown Home and Studio also meets the separate Integrity Criterion as it possesses excellent physical integrity. Brown and his partner preserved the exterior of this 1888 store-and-flat building, but the original projecting pressed metal cornice had already been removed from the building before Brown and his partner acquired the property.

With the preliminary landmark recommendation approved, the building is tentatively shielded from any demolition or major alteration. The proposed designation would declare significant features to be protected as all exterior elevations including rooflines of the building visible from the public rights-of-way as well as the historic Daily News sign painted on the common brick north elevation of the building. 

The proposed designation will need a final landmark recommendation from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks before heading to City Hall for approvals from the Committee on Zoning and City Council.