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Roger Brown was born in Hamilton, Alabama in 1941. He showed an early aptitude for artistic pursuits and his parents encouraged him to develop his talent. He took art classes and won awards in high school, including a statewide poster competition. For college, Brown attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which exposed him to a wide range of influences, such as early Italian Renaissance art, Surrealism, American artists like Edward Hopper and Grant Wood, and tribal art from various cultures. Brown's professors, particularly Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, played significant roles in shaping his aesthetic sensibility.

In the late 1960s, Brown's career began to flourish and he became associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists, which included Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, and others, who rebelled against the contemporary art trends of New York City. Rejecting minimalism and conceptualism, the Imagists embraced figurative art and drew inspiration from popular culture. Brown's painting explored several themes, for instance, urban isolation, natural disasters, political events, and gay culture. Brown and his partner, architect George Veronda, began to split time between Chicago and New Buffalo, Michigan until Veronda died from lung cancer in 1984. After moving to Southern California in the late 1980s, Brown continued to explore similar ideas within his oeuvre and expanded his practice to encompass sculpture, set design for theater and opera productions, and mosaic murals.

Brown's work was exhibited extensively during his lifetime. He was represented by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York. Major retrospectives were organized by prestigious institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. Although Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, and lived with AIDS subsequently, he was quite productive until his passing in 1997. Today works by Brown are featured in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and elsewhere. Brown's first Chicago residence and studio, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, is now maintained by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the Roger Brown Study Collection, showcasing works by Brown and many items from his personal collection of folk and tribal art.