Shoelaces

The mundane subject matter of shoelaces in this print by Roger Brown offers an excuse to produce an engagingly puzzling image that oscillates between the gestural idiosyncrasies of hand drawing and the seriality of mechanical processes. (See Smart Museum 1997.72.) Based on a 90-degree rotation of the first-state image, which was printed four times to form a square, it is one of three variations of shoelaces depicted as abstract zigzagging soft forms.

Brown completed a commercial design program in 1964 at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, but waivered between a career as a commercial artist and as a fine artist throughout the decade. In a course called “Generative Systems” taught by Sonia Sheridan at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), he studied a wide range of graphic media and made unedited silkscreen works like Shoelaces. While at the SAIC he met emerging Chicago Imagists like James Falconer (who printed Shoelaces), Art Green (with whom Brown shared an interest in puzzling imagery), Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum—who exhibited together in the Hairy Who exhibitions. (See 2001.576.) Brown himself participated in the two False Image exhibitions in 1968 and 1969, with Eleanor Dube, Philip Hanson and Christina Ramberg.