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{{Short description|Artist group}}
The '''Chicago Imagists''' are a group of [[Representation (arts)|representational]] artists associated with the [[School of the Art Institute of Chicago]] who exhibited at the [[Hyde Park Art Center]] in the late 1960s.
Their work was known for grotesquerie,
The Imagists had an unusually high proportion of female artists. There are three distinct groups which, outside of Chicago, are indiscriminately bundled together as Imagists: '''The Monster Roster''', '''The Hairy Who''', and The Chicago Imagists.
==The Monster Roster==
The Monster Roster was a group of Chicago artists, several of whom served in [[World War II]] and were able to go to art school thanks to the [[G.I. Bill]].
The Monster Roster included:
* [[Don Baum]]<ref name="AAA">{{cite web | author=| year=2011 | title=Don Baum papers, circa 1940-2004 | work=Research collections | publisher=Archives of American Art | url=http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/don-baum-papers-6592 | accessdate=29 Jun 2011}}</ref>▼
{{Div col|colwidth=22em}}
* Robert Barnes
▲* [[Don Baum]]<ref name="AAA">{{cite web
* Fred Berger
* [[Cosmo Campoli]]
* [[George Cohen (artist)|George Cohen]]
* Dominick Di Meo
* [[Leon Golub]]
* Theodore Halkin
* [[June Leaf]]▼
* [[Arthur Lerner]]
* [[Irving Petlin]]
* [[Seymour Rosofsky]]
* Franz Schulze
* [[Nancy Spero]]
* Evelyn Statsinger
* [[H. C. Westermann]]
{{Div col end}}
▲* [[June Leaf]]
==The Hairy Who==
"Neither a movement nor a style, Hairy Who was simply the name six [[Chicago]] artists chose when they decided to join forces and exhibit together in the mid-1960s."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2722/hairy-who-1966-1969|title=Hairy Who? 1966–1969|website=The Art Institute of Chicago|date=26 September 2018 |language=en|access-date=2019-05-21}}</ref>
The Hairy Who was a "group" made up of six [[School of the Art Institute of Chicago|School of the Art Institute]] graduates, mentored by [[Ray Yoshida]]<ref name="Finley">Larry Finley, "Influential Figure in Chicago Art World: Teacher, Mentor to Artists in Imagism School of 1970s", [[Chicago Sun-Times]], Monday, January 19, 2009</ref> and [[Whitney Halstead]].:<ref name="Newman" /> Jim Falconer, [[Art Green (artist)|Art Green]], [[Gladys Nilsson]], [[Jim Nutt]], [[Karl Wirsum]], and [[Suellen Rocca]]. They developed a vibrant and vulgar approach to art making- and after only six exhibitions together: three at the [[Hyde Park Art Center]] (in '66, '67, and '68), and three out of town, at the [[San Francisco Art Institute]] ('68), the School of Visual Art in New York ('69), and the [[Corcoran Gallery of Art]] in DC ('69), they decided to break up and continued on working on their own individual practices, and/or joined other groups.
In 1964, [[Jim Nutt]], [[Gladys Nilsson]] and Jim Falconer approached the [[Hyde Park Art Center|Hyde Park Art Center's]] exhibitions director, [[Don Baum]] (a key figure in the Hairy Who's success), with the idea of a group show consisting of the three of them, and [[Art Green (artist)|Art Green]] and [[Suellen Rocca]]. Baum agreed, and also suggested they include [[Karl Wirsum]].<ref name="Newman" /> The six artists, held exhibitions at the [[Hyde Park Art Center]] in 1966, 1967, and 1968. They named the exhibitions "Hairy Who?" but never intended to organize themselves
The Hairy Who's paintings were not only inspired by the commercial culture (advertisements, comics, posters, and sales catalogs) found on Chicago's streets but like many Americans of their time, their work came to be during a moment of radical conflict, the [[Vietnam War|war in Vietnam]], student-lead protests, counterculture, turbulent gender and racial relations, and the rapid extension of a capitalist consumer economy. Extremely acidic color choices outlined with thick black outlines, jazzy and psychedelic patterns with an adolescent sense of humor pervade the Hairy Who’s paintings, drawings and sculptures. Across the spectrum of each individual style it was impossible not to distinguish each individual artist from another, although they complement each other what brings them together is the prevalence of figuration, and a treatment of the human face and form that often verges on the grotesque or the cartoonish.
"At the time art show names were very cool, the less they said about the work the cooler (better). There had been a number of shows at [[Museum of Modern Art|MoMA]]… titled “Sixteen Americans” or “Thirteen Americans”... All of us were determined not to emulate such suave coolness, but didn’t have a clue what would work. At our first get-together to discuss the show we were getting nowhere with this problem. This was also our first exposure to Karl in the flesh for the five of us. As frustration mounted from not solving the dilemma, group discussion disintegrated into smaller units, when Karl was heard saying plaintively, “Harry who? Who is this guy?” At which point some of us were hysterically incredulous that he didn’t know about Harry Bouras, the exceptionally self-important artist who was the art critic for [[WFMT]], the cultural FM station in Chicago. All of us found this very funny, including Karl, and as we bantered about variations of the situation, we realized the potential for the name, especially if we changed Harry to Hairy." <ref>Dan Nadel, “Hairy Who’s history of the Hairy Who.” The Ganzfeld 3. New York: Monday Morning, 2003. p. 121-2.</ref>▼
Their sense of humor embraced idiosyncrasy and spontaneity with wordplay, puns, and inside jokes that often belied the transgressiveness of their subject matter. Ambiguous, provocative, but also strategic, their work transmitted progressive ideas that challenged prevailing notions of gender and sexuality, social mores and standards of beauty, and nostalgia and obsolescence. New York gallerist Derek Eller, who has represented Wirsum since 2010, says that Wirsum had next to no presence in the city before that time: his sense is that “the Imagists were always out of sync with New York taste and style”. In the 1960s and 1970s this meant the sternly reductivist forms of Minimalism or Conceptualism; when figuration entered the New York mainstream, through Pop, it was via the mediating filter of contemporary mass media.
The Hairy Who, by contrast, were looking at an array of narrative and vernacular forms such as cartoons, tattoos, Outsider art (including the drawings of the self-taught Joseph Yoakum, who worked in Chicago) as well as the paintings and manuscripts of the Quattrocento, northern Renaissance painting, and traditional arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. In their wide geographical and historical purview, they distanced themselves from the artistic vanguard (and its supporters) which tended to be fixated on its contemporary social and artistic moment.
For the first exhibition they collaborated on an arresting poster depicting a man’s heavily tattooed back, each tattoo designed by a different member of the group. A collaborative comic, ''The Portable Hairy Who!'', was made in place of a catalog and sold at the show for 50 cents a copy. It immediately gave rise to a second show the following year, and another in 1968. The first show was excitedly reviewed (with illustrations!) in Artforum by Professor Whitney Halstead of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), thus fulfilling the artists’ ambition to get their work to a wider audience. As a result, in 1968 Philip Linhares, the San Francisco Art Institute curator, offered them their first show outside Chicago. The next year, Walter Hopps, who had founded the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and was at the time the Curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, invited them to stage an exhibition.
The naming of the exhibition was explained in an interview conducted by Dan Nadel with artist [[Jim Nutt]]:
▲"At the time art show names were very cool, the less they said about the work the cooler (better). There had been a number of shows at [[Museum of Modern Art|MoMA]]… titled
"Nonetheless, there is an important distinction to be made between The Chicago Imagist and Hairy Who, says Thea Liberty Nichols, the Researcher of Prints and Drawings at the [[Art Institute of Chicago|AIC]], who co-organized “Hairy Who? 1966-1969” with Mark Pascale, the Curator of Prints and Drawings and Ann Goldstein, the Deputy Director and Chair, and Curator of [[Modern and Contemporary Art Research Initiative|Modern and Contemporary Art]]. “The Hairy Who was an artist-designed, artist-named exhibition group while Chicago Imagism was a label was applied to a whole gaggle of artists by an outside critic,” Nichols says."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.artagencypartners.com/must-see-jonathan-griffin-4-october-2018/|title="The art of the Hairy Who would scratch your eyes out" – Art Agency, Partners|language=en-US|access-date=2019-05-21}}</ref>
The Hairy Who included:
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==The Chicago Imagists==
The Imagists were not a formal group, but rather a description of artists involved in shows curated by Baum in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Several other artists, including [[Roger Brown (artist)|Roger Brown]], [[Ed Paschke]], [[Barbara Rossi (artist)|Barbara Rossi]] and
* [[Roger Brown (artist)|Roger Brown]]
* [[Ed Paschke]]
* [[Christina Ramberg]]
* [[Phil Hanson (artist)|Philip Hanson]]
* [[Barbara Rossi (artist)|Barbara Rossi]]
* [[Ed Flood]]
* [[Irving Petlin]]
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* [[Ray Yoshida]]
* [[Errol Ortiz]]
* [[Ronald Markman]]
* [[Lynn Duenow]]
In 1969 the [[Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago]] exhibited many Imagists, including Yoshida, in a show entitled "Don Baum
==Distinction between Chicago Imagism and New York Pop Art==
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==Other artists==
Outside of Chicago, any Chicago artist whose work is figurative and quirky is often called an Imagist. Chicago artists who paint strange and figurative works, but are not Imagists, include:
* [[Phyllis Bramson]]
* Richard Hull
* [[Paul Lamantia]]<ref name="Boris96”">Boris, Staci. “Paul LaMantia,” [https://www.amazon.com/Art-Chicago-1945-1995-Jeff-Abell/dp/050023728X ''Art in Chicago 1945-1995''], Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 265. Retrieved May 1, 2018.</ref>
* [[Robert Lostutter]]
* [[Hollis Sigler]]
* [[Eleanor Spiess-Ferris]]
In fact, Imagism as a style or school is elastic enough that abstract artists from Chicago working in an organic or surrealist-influenced style during Imagism's heyday, such as [[David Sharpe (artist)|David Sharpe]], Steven Urry, and Jordan Davies, have been described as "Abstract Imagists."<ref name="Corbett06">Corbett, John. “Abstract Imagist,” [https://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Imagist-John-Corbett/dp/B006OQ25YS ''Abstract Imagist''], Chicago: Corbett vs Dempsey, 2006. Retrieved September 10, 2018</ref><ref name="Allen74">Allen, Jane and Derek Guthrie. “David Sharpe,” ''New Art Examiner'', April 1974.</ref><ref name="Artner06b">Artner, Alan G. [http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-11-17/entertainment/0611170258_1_youngest-artists-imagists-abstraction “Imagist Show Is An Unlikely Collection across Generations,”]{{dead link|date=September 2024|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}} ''Chicago Tribune'', November 17, 2006. Retrieved September 9, 2018.</ref>
== Legacy ==
The legacy of The Chicago Imagists is notably explored in [[Pentimenti Production|Pentimenti Production's]] film, ''[[Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists]]'', directed by Chicago Filmmaker [[Leslie Buchbinder]].<ref>{{Cite web|title = Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists {{!}} Pentimenti|url = http://pentimentiproductions.org/projects/hairy-who|website = pentimentiproductions.org|
==See also==
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*[http://pentimentiproductions.org PentimentiProductions]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20071010100247/http://www.artn.com/PostCanvas/PostPaschke.htm Art’n: Painting in Pixels]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20160314121454/http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/CHGOimagists.shtml JUMPIN' BACKFLASH: Original
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20081114050752/http://www.kwag.on.ca/user_files/images/File/Forms/ag_cat_4web.pdf Heavy Weather: Art Green Retrospective]
{{Surrealism}}
{{Art Institute of Chicago}}
{{Authority control}}
[[Category:American art movements]]
[[Category:American surrealist artists]]
[[Category:Surrealist groups]]
[[Category:
[[Category:History of Chicago]]
[[Category:School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni|.]]
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