Playing House/Museum

Abstract

What happens when a historic house museum is owned and operated by an art school, much of the work is done by students, and it is used as a stage for contemporary practices and experimentation? The Roger Brown Study Collection, an instructional resource of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), has operated as an “artists’ museum” for the SAIC community and the public since 1997. Our project has been to rewrite the rules of playing house/museum, to allow the histories of a nineteenth-century building and a twentieth-century artist to perform fully in the twenty-first century.