The exhibition ‘Dear folks,’ was developed through a semester long curatorial research project conducted by students in the ‘Art Objects Alive’ class with the Roger Brown Study Collection.

With the School of the Art Institute of Chicago celebrating its 150th anniversary year the class took this as an opportunity to reflect on their first experiences as students at SAIC and in Chicago via the letters which Roger Brown wrote to his parents when he was first a student at the School. The letters were commonly addressed “Dear Folks,” which became the title of this reflective curatorial project. Further research in SAIC’s libraries, Special Collections and in the Institutional Archive offered extended details which developed a curatorial plan for the presentation of original 2D and 3D object responses, made by the class, alongside seven paintings that Roger Brown made as a student.

Co-curated by Samuel Snodgrass at the Roger Brown Study Collection