Roger Brown, the Imagist painter and collector extraordinaire, was born in Alabama in 1941 to a religious family that encouraged his art. He remained close to them, returning home in 1997 to die of AIDS at 55 .

The artist, however, lived most of his life in and around Chicago, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and consorted with other Imagists (initially known as the Hairy Who), an often ribald group that included Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Ray Yoshida and Christina Ramberg. They emerged in the early 1970s, making irreverent figurative works rooted in Surrealism and popular culture that snobby, ill-informed New Yorkers (which was most of us at that time) called Regionalist.

Brown also lived surrounded by dizzyingly dense arrays of flea market and thrift shop finds, some of which eventually made their way into his artworks. A slide show of the three homes Brown assembled and lived in is the place to start in the idiosyncratic but excellent exhibition “Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes” at the Museum of Arts and Design, the first museum show devoted to his work in New York. The slides, projected large, as if you might almost step into them, form a gripping account of one artist’s taste and voracious acquisitiveness as well as the rich veins of Americana that fed his art.