CategoriesStyles and Movements
Chicago Imagists
Chicago artists of the 1960s and 1970s whose bright, cartoon-like and grotesque figurative work drew on comics, folk art and museum collections.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Chicago Imagists are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Between 1966 and 1969 an art centre in Chicago's Hyde Park neighbourhood showed six young artists calling themselves the Hairy Who: Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum. Their catalogues were comic books, and their work looked like nothing coming out of New York. Don Baum organised further groups, and critics later called them all Imagists.
Most had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago's school, where teachers such as Ray Yoshida sent them to flea markets, comic strips, tattoo designs, ethnographic collections and self-taught artists like Joseph Yoakum. The results are crisp, intensely coloured and often funny or unsettling: Nutt's contorted figures painted on the back of Plexiglas, Roger Brown's stylised cityscapes, Ed Paschke's lurid media portraits, Christina Ramberg's corseted torsos. Look for tight outlines, puns, distorted bodies and obsessive patterning. The 1950s Monster Roster had paved the way.