Roger Brown: Southern Exposure (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 8 145 the city and impel the reader to check the nine pages of maps at the end to locate the image. For the railway modeler, the photographs show yard buildings, signals, depots (which enjoy two full chapters of their own), mining cars, and steel mills. They even have a chapter on the Birmingham trolley system for the traction addicts. Reviewers are supposed to criticize as well as laud. With this book it is difficult. The book is exactly what it claims to be—a popular history of railroads in the area. It omits only the social aspect of railroading. There is little on the laborers and their working conditions. Racial peculiarities peek in only when Jim Crow cars are mentioned. But that is not the book Clemons and Key set out to write and such topics are more difficult to work into a pictorial history. Birmingham Rails is a great value for its price. It combines a visual feast with serious consideration of why the railroads were there and what happened to them. In between the lines the reader will discover why Birmingham declined in the twentieth century and its effect on the railroads . For a popular and interesting look at the subject, this book is a model of its kind. JAMES A. WARD University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Roger Brown: Southern Exposure. By Sidney Lawrence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. 57 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-8173-5469-5. In his seminal work, Art as Experience (New York, 1934), the American philosopher and educator John Dewey speaks to how, as individuals, we always carry with us elements of our pasts which serve to influence how we view the world around us, and particularly how we come to aesthetic decisions. This line of thinking is evident in the works created by the artist Roger Brown and reinforced in Sidney Lawrence’s thorough essay on Brown and his experience of growing up in the rural South while living the majority of his life in an urban setting. Lying halfway between a biographical account of Brown’s life and work and an exhibition catalog, the book captures the spirit of Brown’s art and the artist’s transformation from an inquisitive country boy to nationally recognized artist. Raised in the small town of Opelika, Brown was an avid collector from childhood (with interests ranging from comic books to movie posters and eventually to folk art). He also cultivated a life-long interest in science T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 146 fiction characters, genealogy, and a desire to be his own person; each activity influenced his artistic sensibility. Although raised in a church that preached fire and brimstone, which Brown and his brother Greg found to be “extremely repressive” (p. 2), Brown nevertheless retained a degree of spirituality. That aspect of his outlook surfaced within a number of his works, albeit often sarcastically, from The Entry of Christ in Chicago, to a contemporary take on pestilence in The Seven Last Plagues, to God depicted as Kenny Rogers in his Story of Creation. As an art history student, my first encounter with Brown was through his painting Ablaze and Ajar, a highly charged work that depicts two skyscrapers surrounded by fire cracking in half. The juxtaposition of the chaotic urban landscape and acts of nature’s impending doom remained a prominent theme in much of Brown’s work as did his experiences with family and his southern roots. Lawrence captures Brown’s journey as an artist from his earliest drawings to his plans for the Rock House Museum which was completed following Brown’s death, and he guides the reader through each stage of Brown’s life. Family photographs and drawings accompany the text, creating a feeling of a family album or scrapbook. I found Lawrence’s attempt to categorize Brown into a specific art genre problematic. Brown was always associated with the Chicago Imagists, but what set him apart—and what I believe has given his work staying power—is that his work has a certain hybridity...