Deinstalling and Reinstalling Roger Brown’s New Buffalo Collection
Thursday, December 8th, 2011 » By James Connolly » See more posts from Happening Now at the RBSC
This past summer I assisted RBSC staff members Lisa Stone and Nick Lowe along with art conservator Tim Fox and his team of art handlers, Kelly Stachura and Daniel Baird, in deinstalling and then reinstalling Roger Brown’s collection at his New Buffalo, Michigan residency for the interior to be worked on.
The entire process, partially documented in the video below, consisted of gathering meticulous measurements of all of Roger Brown’s hanging hardware as well as extensive photography of every area of the collection to ensure the reinstallation was exactly how Brown intended it to be. Every object was then cleaned, photographed, measured, and conditioned before being reinstalled based on diagrams we created from photographs and measurements.
Video by James Connolly
Gifted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 to be used as an artist’s retreat, Roger Brown’s former home, studio, and collection in New Buffalo, Michigan is an incredible architectural space. Designed by Brown’s partner, the architect George Veronda, the building channels Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in its openness to the natural world surrounding it, in this case the Lake Michigan sand dunes. The collection contains work by several Chicago artists including Ray Yoshida, Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Sarah Canright, Karl Wirsum, and Robert Gordy among several others, and the setting influenced numerous important paintings made by Roger Brown in the 1980s and 90s. More information can be found here.
-James Connolly
