This painting illustrates Roger Brown’s family’s ancestral journey from their first arrival in America to their eventual migration to various locales throughout the Southern US. It features the names of the various families to which Brown could trace his genealogical connections.

Brown was interested in the patterns of migration Americans followed, and he conducted exhaustive research into his own family’s genealogical and geographical history. One of his best known paintings, currently in the collection of the MCA Chicago, is Autobiography in the Shape of Alabama (Mammyʼs Door), painted on the back of a door that’s decorated with family memorabilia.

By painting this work as a sideshow banner, Brown draws attention to one of the perhaps under-appreciated aspects of the format: the distinction sideshow banners make between the two types of shows they advertise. A show that mainly features objects or relics is called a “museum show;” a show that features living actors or creatures is said to be “alive.”

In this painting, Brown paints “COMING TO AMERICA” in the space where the word “ALIVE!” would usually appear. He was fascinated with the ongoing evolution of migratory and genealogical patterns in the United States, perceiving this part of history not as something fixed like a museum exhibition, waiting to be studied, but as something that was alive and eternally evolving.