Chicago Imagists

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The Chicago Imagists is the name of a group of 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, surrealism, and complete uninvolvement with New York art world trends. One remarkable thing about them was the high proportion of female artists among them.

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.

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[edit] 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. They were given their name in 1959 by critic Franz Schulze, based on their existential, sometimes gruesome, semi-mystical figurative work. The Monster Roster included:

[edit] The Hairy Who

A group of six artists, under the tutelage of Don Baum, organized and curated three exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, 1967, and 1968. They named the exhibitions "Hairy Who?" but never intended to organize themselves together as a unified group. The naming of the exhibition was explained in an interview conducted by Dan Nadal 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 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." (Nadel, Dan. “Hairy Who’s history of the Hairy Who.” The Ganzfeld 3. New York: Monday Morning, 2003. p. 121-2.)

The Hairy Who included:

Several other artists, including Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi and Phil Hanson are often incorrectly associated with the Hairy Who exhibitions, when in fact they showed at the Hyde Park Art Center between 1968-1971 in several other shows, such as Non-Plussed Some, False Image, Chicago Antigua and Marriage Chicago Style.

[edit] The Chicago Imagists

The Imagists were not a formal group, but rather a description of artists involved in shows curated by Don Baum in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. In addition to the Hairy Who, above, they included:

[edit] Artists Who Are Not Imagists

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:

[edit] References

Richard Vine, "Where the Wild Things Were", Art in America, May 1997, pp. 98-111.

[edit] External links

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