presents
HAIRY WHO
&
THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
In 1966, an enigmatic exhibition in Chicago bore the title: Hairy Who. The first gathering of a loose group of
artists known subsequently as the “Chicago Imagists”, the Hairy Who mounted several shows before the end
of the ‘60s, as did two other exhibition groups, the False Image and the Nonplussed Some. With a wildly exuberant and eccentric sensibility, the Imagists created paintings and objects that explored the deepest and
darkest niches of the human psychosexual experience, drawing on commercial and “outsider” art, Surrealism,
Pop, and something else completely original and totally weird. The id runs rampant over the super-ego, and the
high-brow tangos with the low-brow. The Imagists were most widely known in the 1970s and 1980s, and they have
continued working, forging divergent paths from a common ancestry.
Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists
explores the lives and works of the
following 14 artists:
Roger BROWN - pg 2
Sarah CANRIGHT - pg 3
Jim FALCONER - pg 4
Ed FLOOD - pg 5
Art GREEN - pg 6
Philip HANSON - pg 7
Gladys NILSSON - pg 8
Jim NUTT - pg 9
Ed PASCHKE - pgs 10-11
Christina RAMBERG - pg 12
Suellen ROCCA - pg 13
Barbara ROSSI - pg 14
Karl WIRSUM - pg 15
Ray YOSHIDA - pgs 16-17
HAIRY WHO
&
THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS
ROGER BROWN | b. 1941 – d. 1997
Roger Brown was born in Hamilton, Alabama in 1941. In 1962 Brown moved to Chicago to attend the
School of the Art Institute. Brown was interested in commercial design for practical reasons, but also because he loved the flat, clear look of old-fashioned illustrations and decals. But by 1966 he realized that
there was little market for his retro design sensibility, and re-entered SAIC to complete his BFA and MFA
and embark on a career as a professional artist.
Brown began by painting moody surrealist scenes that drew on his love of Art Deco movie theaters
and the comic books and toys of his childhood. After his first trip to the American Southwest in 1968
Brown began painting landscapes, a form that would persist for most of his career.
In 1968 Brown was included in False Image, a group exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center along with
fellow students Christina Ramberg, Philip Hanson, and Eleanor Dube. Brown’s inclusion in the False
Image show that year and its subsequent sequels solidified his place in the group of artists who would
come to be known as the Imagists. In 1969, while still a student at SAIC, Brown was included in his first
museum exhibition alongside many of his fellow Imagists, Don Baum Says “Chicago Needs Famous
Artists.” Brown began showing with Phyllis Kind Gallery in 1970, a relationship that would continue for
the rest of his life.
In 1972 Brown was introduced to George Veronda, an architect at C.F. Murphy and Associates who
would become his partner. Brown had always been fascinated with Chicago’s streetscape, and with
Veronda expanded his interest in the modernist architecture that had transformed the city over the
course of the previous decades. This interest made its way into his artwork and he began painting skyscrapers, usually in some state of collapse. These new works were shown in his Disasters
exhibition at Phyllis Kind Gallery in 1973.
Throughout the rest of the 1970s Brown’s work and reputation continued to expand. In 1973 he was included in the Made in Chicago exhibition at the São Paulo Bienal, which subsequently traveled throughout South and Central America and to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. before returning to Chicago’s
Museum of Contemporary Art. That same year Brown had his first European show at Galerie Darthea
Speyer in Paris, and a solo exhibition of his work inaugurated Phyllis Kind’s new gallery in New York.
Brown’s work continued to evolve, although always retaining his characteristically biting take on American culture and his fascination with vernacular art forms. In the 1980s he began painting in the style
of the circus freak show banners that he had been collecting since his SAIC days. But in Brown’s work
the freaks being advertised were corrupt politicians, twisted celebrities, bigoted religious figures, and
immoral corporations.
During his partner George Veronda’s sickness and after his death, Brown worked through these experiences in his studio, and his paintings developed an even darker cast, explicitly addressing sickness,
dying, and death. But even as his personal life suffered, his career grew. He was included in the 1984
Venice Biennale, and he increasingly received commissions for public murals, set designs for theater
and opera, and illustrations in popular media like Time magazine. Brown died in California in 1997, at
only 56 years old. According to Brown’s wishes his home and studio in Chicago are now owned by
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and operated as the Roger Brown Study Collection, a house
museum, gallery space, and archive that is open to the public.
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HAIRY WHO
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THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS
SARAH CANRIGHT | b. 1941: Lives & works in Austin, Texas
Sarah Canright came to Chicago in the early 1960s to study at the School of the Art Institute, and
received her BFA in 1964.
As Canright became accustomed to the sights of the city, its influence began appearing in her paintings. Her first mature works all feature smokestacks, which she felt captured the “urban bleakness”
of her life in the city. Although Canright, like all of the Imagist artists, had her own idiosyncratic style,
some basic Imagist concepts were already apparent in this early work. In particular, they shared an
illustrative, clean-lined flatness with artists like Ed Flood and Roger Brown.
Canright’s early realization of the power of her perspective as a female artist would shape the rest of
her career. Although this first manifested itself in what she called “obvious” female themes, as Canright’s voice continued to develop, she began to use these stereotypically feminine elements with a
subversive violence, developing palettes so pale that they were difficult to look at and nearly
impossible to reproduce in slides.
She was an active participant in the Imagist group exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, including
both of the Nonplussed Some exhibitions in 1968 and 1969, Marriage Chicago Style in 1970, and Chicago
Antigua in 1971.
In 1972 Canright and her husband, Imagist painter Ed Flood, moved to New York. Canright had begun
to feel isolated in Chicago. Although the other Imagist artists were her closest friends, she increasingly
felt creatively disconnected as her paintings became less figurative and more abstract. In New York,
Canright’s paintings began to grow in scale, and she developed close relationships with other female
artists including Yvonne Jacquette and Cynthia Carlson. She began exhibiting her work regularly with
Pam Adler Gallery and was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial.
Canright has taught painting at schools across the country since the mid-1970s. In the mid-1990s
she moved to Austin to teach full-time at the University of Texas, where she remains today. She was
the subject of a solo exhibition at New York’s Cue Art Foundation in 2011, and her work is held in the
permanent collections of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Madison Museum of
Contemporary Art.
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HAIRY WHO
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THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS
JIM FALCONER | b. 1943: Lives & works in Chicago
James Falconer was born in 1943 and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Around 1962 he came to Chicago
to study at the School of the Art Institute, where he first met Jim Nutt and eventually the rest of the
artists that would become the Imagists.
Falconer’s artwork from the mid-1960s already displays the extreme individualism that would characterize the rest of his unusual career. His paintings, drawings, and prints synthesize a variety of
personal and artistic influences gathered from his environment, fellow students, and teachers, including a fascination with the intense emotion of German Expressionism, the dark humor of artists like
Peter Saul and H.C. Westermann, and the unhinged weirdness of Surrealism. Falconer explored his
physical surroundings for inspiration as well, picking up and incorporating the vintage linoleum and
hand-painted signs that filled the apartments and neighborhoods in which he lived. Falconer was also
a keen craftsman, carefully piecing together artworks that were precious objects more than just paint
on canvas, featuring painted frames and idiosyncratic mixtures of neon colors and disparate media.
In 1966, around the time of Falconer’s graduation from SAIC, he participated in the first Hairy Who
exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center along with his friends Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca,
Art Green, and Karl Wirsum. Although he was not a part of the second Hairy Who show in 1967, he
returned for the final installment in 1968. He was subsequently included in the Hairy Who exhibition
mounted at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, DC in 1969. Around this time, he also became
involved in political protest actions, and in 1969 he co-founded the group Artists Against the Vietnam
War along with Dominick Di Meo, Robert Donley, and Donald Main.
In the years after the series of Hairy Who exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Falconer’s creative
development took a different path than that of his friends. As he abandoned his Hairy Who body of
work, he moved to New York in order to more freely explore his burgeoning interests in photography
and film. He stayed in New York for 32 years, working on films, photography, and painting but eventually developing a career as a designer of music studios. In the early 2000s he moved back to Chicago,
and in 2012 he exhibited a new body of abstract paintings at Chicago’s Thomas McCormick Gallery.
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HAIRY WHO
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THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS
ED FLOOD | b. 1944 - d. 1984
Ed Flood was born in 1944 and spent his childhood in the suburbs of Chicago. In the early 1960s, he came
to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute. He received his BFA in 1967 and his MFA in 1969.
Flood rarely socialized during his school years with the other artists that would become known as the
Imagists. He spent his years at school struggling to develop an individual artistic voice distinct from
his classmates. His first paintings were of neckties, inspired by an attempt to create a self-portrait on a
Xerox machine that produced only an image of his necktie.
The flat, clean appearance of Flood’s first mature works were inspired in part by the printed logos
on some of the shopping bags that he picked up, and Flood began using reverse-painted Plexiglas
because its perfectly smooth appearance best approximated their machine-made quality. Palm trees
would become a near-constant motif in Flood’s early work, populating fictional beaches and sand bars,
lending a sense of narrative to otherwise abstract landscapes.
In 1968, curator Don Baum asked Flood to put together a show at the Hyde Park Art Center in the
Hairy Who vein but with a new group of artists. Flood recruited his friend Ed Paschke, and together
they planned the Nonplussed Some exhibition. Flood’s first solo exhibition was at Allan Frumkin
Gallery in Chicago in 1970.
Throughout the early 1970s, Flood continued to exhibit frequently in Chicago and elsewhere, often in
group shows with other Imagist artists, at Allan Frumkin Gallery, Richard Feigen Gallery, Phyllis Kind
Gallery, and the Hyde Park Art Center. In 1974, he was included in the Made in Chicago exhibition at the
São Paulo Bienal, which traveled around South and Central America before returning to the Smithsonian
in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Flood’s preferred medium during this time, elaborate box constructions containing layers of Plexi,
allowed him to create evocative three-dimensional environments without abandoning the perfect
smoothness of reverse-painting which was so important to him. They also provided an outlet for the
meticulous craftsmanship that Flood had learned from his mentor, H.C. Westermann. The two artists
often exchanged building and woodworking advice and custom hardware, relying on one another at a
time when traditional craft skills were not widely celebrated in the contemporary art world.
In 1972, Flood and his wife Sarah Canright relocated to New York, and lived in the same building with
the Pop artist Red Grooms, who had spent time in Chicago in 1967 and involved Flood in the production of his films. In the early 1980s Flood had solo exhibitions at Pam Adler Gallery in New York and
was included in group shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and New Museum.
Flood’s life was tragically short. In 1985, the same year he received a Pollock/Krasner Foundation
Grant, he died at the age of 41. More recent exhibitions include a solo show at Chicago’s Corbett vs.
Dempsey gallery in 2009 and group shows at Thomas Dane Gallery in London in 2011 and Galerie
Daniel Buchholz in Cologne in 2012.
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ART GREEN | b. 1941 : Lives & works in Stratford, Ontario
Art Green was born in 1941 in Frankfort, Indiana, and took the advice of a high school teacher to come to
Chicago in 1960, at first with plans to become an industrial designer or commercial artist. After one year
at the School of the Art Institute, he decided to become a painter instead. He received his BFA in 1965.
The Art Institute’s collection and its annual American Exhibitions exposed him for the first time to Pop
and Surrealist artists like Rene Magritte, Giorgio Di Chirico, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. The
power of the Surrealist art that Green saw within the museum’s galleries was intensified by the “surreal
vistas” that surrounded him elsewhere in the city. From the fire-spitting factories on the Illinois-Indiana border that greeted him as he entered the city for the first time, to the grand spaces of Symphony
Hall, where he worked as an usher, Chicago was filled with extreme and often inexplicable contrasts.
Green surrounded himself in his studio with comics, illustrated food packages, and odd advertisements he found swirling in the trash-filled streets, which found their way into Green’s personal brand
of surrealism: collapsing architectural spaces filled with ice cream cones, car tires, diseased limbs, and
manicured fingernails.
While still a student, Green threw himself into the active group exhibition scene that characterized Chicago in the mid-1960s. In 1965 he was included in the Phalanx III show at the Illinois Institute of Technology
and Don Baum’s Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral themed group shows at the Hyde Park Art Center. In
1966, after finishing classes at SAIC, Green was a part of the first Hairy Who exhibition at the Hyde Park
Art Center, and would return for subsequent shows with the same group over the course of the next three
years at HPAC, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. He was also
a part of Don Baum Says “Chicago Needs Famous Artists” at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in
1969, and What They’re Up to in Chicago, which traveled throughout Canada in 1972. Green’s first European exposure came in 1970 with a three-person show at Darthea Speyer Gallery in Paris.
In 1969 Green was offered a well-paying teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Despite emigrating to Canada, Green had regular solo exhibitions at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and
New York throughout the 1970s. Kind was a consistent and important supporter of Green’s work until the
mid-1980s, and she maintained his connection to the rest of the Imagist artists that she also showed.
After two years in Nova Scotia, Green moved to Vancouver. His compositions, always extremely complex,
became increasingly baroque. Shattered and woven layers of reflection and refraction were rendered
with Escher-like exactitude, using carefully controlled shading and gradation.
By the late 1970s Green had moved to Ontario and taken a job as a professor of painting at the University of Waterloo. He remained there until his retirement in 2006, spending two years as the chair of
the department. In 2005, the university’s art gallery hosted Heavy Weather, a major retrospective of
his work. In 2009 he was the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Jim Nutt at the CUE Foundation in
New York. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary
Art Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna.
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HAIRY WHO
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THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS
PHILIP HANSON | b. 1943: Lives & works in Chicago
Born in 1943 and raised in Chicago, Philip Hanson received his bachelor’s degree in the humanities from
the University of Chicago in 1965. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1968.
Also in 1968, Hanson was included in False Image at the Hyde Park Art Center along with fellow students
Roger Brown, Eleanor Dube, and Christina Ramberg. The False Image exhibition aimed to put the successful Hairy Who model to work for a new group of young artists.
The flat stylization of popular print material, such as advertisements and comic books, informed Hanson,
whose early paintings referenced representative tropes of comics – including melancholy dancing
couples and foreboding black shadows – along with the sentimental dedications on cheap printed
gift-candy boxes. Hanson’s uniquely dreamy, sweetly dark style drew on a wide range of cultural
references, including Art Deco interior decoration, opera, and poetry, in addition to the Surrealist and
vernacular sources that were shared among all of the Imagist artists.
The False Image artists regrouped for another show at HPAC the following year, in 1969, the same year
that HPAC’s curator Don Baum included Hanson in Don Baum Says “Chicago Needs Famous Artists”
at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Hanson’s work also appeared that year in The Spirit of the
Comics at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Beginning in the early 1970s Hanson began
showing at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago, which represented many of the Imagist artists, and he continued to have solo shows at Kind’s gallery on a regular basis until the mid-1980s.
In 1973 Hanson was included in the Made In Chicago exhibition at the São Paulo Bienal, which traveled
around South and Central America, back to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and to Chicago’s MCA.
He was also included in Who Chicago?, a 1980 exhibition of Imagist artwork that traveled around the
United Kingdom.
Even as early as the False Image years in the late 1960s, Hanson was interested in his artworks as
objects. He experimented with bringing the medium of painted canvas into three dimensions, teaching
himself how to sew origami-like cloth pieces into wall sculptures that resembled insects, crustaceans,
masks, or suits of armor. By the 1990s, Hanson’s lifelong love of poetry had become even more explicit
in his work, which featured elaborately layered painted words from poems by Emily Dickinson, William
Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, and others.
Hanson taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for forty years before retiring in the autumn
of 2013. His work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art
(Atlanta). Museum des 20 Jahrhundrets (Vienna), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the
National Museum of American Art.
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GLADYS NILSSON | b. 1940: Lives & works in Chicago
Gladys Nilsson was born in Chicago in 1940 to a working class family. She received her BFA from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962.
While at SAIC, she met fellow student Jim Nutt, and the two married in 1961. Her professor Whitney
Halstead introduced her and Nutt to the Hyde Park Art Center’s curator Don Baum. In 1966, Nutt, Jim
Falconer and Baum organized the first Hairy Who exhibition at HPAC in order to give greater attention
to a select group of young artists. That show, and its sequels at HPAC within the following two years,
firmly established HPAC, Nilsson, and her fellow artists as serious players in Chicago’s art scene.
Nilsson’s early works reveal major elements of the artistic language that she would continue to develop for the rest of her career. Her compositions were dense and complicated, with objects and characters floating in space or crowding the frame, unconcerned with rules of gravity, scale and proportion.
The rubbery figures and constant vibrating motion of early Popeye cartoons became a tremendously
exciting resource for Nilsson. She played with human forms as though they were made out of putty,
flattening torsos into angular masses and extending limbs to absurd, curling lengths. She also continued to use humor, especially in her titles, which often contained puns or bizarre misspellings.
Nilsson’s work continued to be included in Imagist group shows, including at Chicago’s Museum of
Contemporary Art, and the Made in Chicago exhibition at the São Paulo Bienal in 1973 which traveled
around Central and South America, as well as to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. In 1970 Nilsson
began exhibiting with Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago, which would eventually represent a number of
other Imagist artists.
But Nilsson’s work was also receiving validation outside of its Imagist context. She was included in a
number of broader thematic group shows around the country during those years, including The Spirit
of the Comics at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1969 and Human Concern / Personal
Torment at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York the same year. In 1973 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York.
By the 1970s, Nilsson had found her way into the medium for which she would eventually become best
known: watercolor. She learned how to use the thin pigments and the thick texture of watercolor paper
to create rich, complex, other-worldly colored compositions. Despite the commonly held belief that
works on paper are lesser than works on canvas, Nilsson’s skill with watercolor has allowed her to build
a successful career without returning to canvas.
In the 1990s, Nilsson moved to Jean Albano Gallery in Chicago, where she remains represented today,
and is the subject of regular solo exhibition. Nilsson’s artwork is held in museum collections all over the
world, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Museum of Modern Art
(New York), the Museum Modern Kunst (Vienna), the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, D.C.), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City).
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JIM NUTT | b. 1938: Lives & works in Chicago
Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1938, Jim Nutt transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
in 1960 to study painting. He married fellow student Gladys Nilsson in 1961. Nutt received his BFA in 1965.
As a student, Nutt worked at the Allan Frumkin gallery, and enjoyed intimate interactions with the
work of artists like Max Beckmann, James Ensor, and H.C. Westermann. The graphic strength and
emotional intensity of German Expressionism, the dark beauty of Ensor, and the humor and meticulous
craftsmanship of Westermann likely all resonated with Nutt.
In the mid 1960s, Nutt’s professor Whitney Halstead introduced him to Don Baum, the curator of the
Hyde Park Art Center. Although he did not yet have enough work to fill a solo show, he and fellow SAIC
student Jim Falconer decided that by reducing the number of artists in a group show to five or six, they
could attract more attention to each participant. The group of six artists would show in a series of Hairy
Who exhibitions over the next three years at HPAC, the San Francisco Art Institute (1968), the Corcoran
Gallery in Washington, D.C (1969), and the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York (1969).
Nutt continued to expand upon his signature scatological imagery and improved his skills as a craftsman. In particular he became a master of the medium of reverse-painted Plexiglas. Nutt had been
fascinated with the reverse-painted graphics in pinball machines since his childhood, but was always
frustrated in his attempts to re-create them in his own work. Nutt pushed himself to improve his
skills, and by the late 1960s was creating monumental Plexiglas pieces with bizarre scenes rendered
in intense and perfectly flat color, custom frames, and often with other materials affixed onto their
surfaces. Nutt’s ability to combine magnificent, meticulous craftsmanship and deeply odd, sometimes
repellant imagery, would become a signature feature of his career.
By 1968 the Hairy Who group had became the toast of the Chicago art world. In 1968, after being
offered a teaching position at Sacramento State College, Nutt and Nilsson moved their family to California. Nutt retained his connection to Chicago through regular shows at Phyllis Kind Gallery, group
shows with the rest of his Imagist cohorts, and a solo exhibition in 1974 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
In 1972, Walter Hopps selected Nutt for inclusion in the Venice Biennale. The following year, Nutt was
included in the Whitney Biennial and the Made in Chicago exhibition at the São Paolo Bienal, which
traveled around Central and South America, and to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. This schedule
of shows around the world established Nutt’s reputation as an important contemporary artist with an
international reputation.
Nutt abandoned painting on Plexi in 1971, and eventually settled on canvas as his primary support.
His subject matter also began narrowing, from wild scenes with figures and objects floating in space
and speaking in word bubbles, to single portraits, usually of women, from the shoulders up. Although
the goofy obscenity that characterized his early paintings began to fade, the unsettling strangeness
remains in the twisted, bruised flesh of these portraits.
In the late 1990s, Nutt began showing with David Nolan Gallery in New York. In 1994, the Milwaukee
Art Museum organized a major retrospective of his work, which traveled to the Henry Art Gallery in
Seattle, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago organized a second retrospective in 2011.
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ED PASCHKE | b. 1939 - d. 2004
Born in Chicago in 1939, Ed Paschke was raised in both the city and suburbs. In 1957, he enrolled at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received his BFA in 1961.
Perhaps the most important formative episodes of Paschke’s life had nothing to do with his training as
an artist. One of the first jobs he held was an assistant at a mental institution. It was there that Paschke
began developing an interest in eccentric characters and forgotten members of society, a theme he
explored repeatedly in his work throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
After two years in the Army, Paschke found work as a professional illustrator, selling spots to Playboy
magazine, but also began to pursue his own art practice. He began wandering Chicago’s myriad
neighborhoods in search of “indigenous oddities” like streetwalkers and unusual signage that he could
incorporate into his paintings. Although Paschke’s undergraduate education had focused on painterly
abstraction and expressionism, the ascendance of Pop Art during the late 1960s gave his interest in
popular imagery credibility, and he began to pursue representational painting with greater enthusiasm. In the late 1960s, he took advantage of the GI Bill to re-enroll at SAIC as a graduate student and
received his MFA in 1970.
While in graduate school, Paschke was aware of the successes being achieved by his fellow SAIC students at the Hyde Park Art Center’s Hairy Who and False Image shows. In 1968 he collaborated with Ed
Flood to organize a series of group shows of their own, entitled Nonplussed Some. After the success
of these shows, Paschke also participated in Marriage Chicago Style and Chicago Antigua, both also at
HPAC in 1970 and 1971, respectively.
Paschke’s hope that participating in group shows at HPAC would propel him to greater individual
success was borne out in the following years. Although many of the museum shows in which he was
included in the late 1960s and early 1970s were Imagist-themed – including Chicago Imagist Art (1972)
at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Surplus Slop from the Windy City (1970) at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Made In Chicago (1974) at the São Paolo Bienal – he also began to build a
national reputation for himself individually. Paschke’s photorealistic style set him apart from the rest of
the Imagist group aesthetically. Non-Imagist group shows from these years included Human Concern/
Personal Torment at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1970, and the 1973 Whitney Biennial. From
1970-75, Paschke also had regular solo exhibitions at Deson Zaks Gallery in Chicago. Starting in 1977,
Paschke was represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery, along with many of his Imagist colleagues, and he
had regular shows at Kind’s Chicago and New York locations until the mid-1990s.
Paschke continued to work with the a body of imagery including garishly colored photorealistic
renderings of real and imagined characters from the outer reaches of physical and social normalcy.
Pimps, strippers, and circus freaks were common figures in his paintings. He did a series of paintings of
items made out of leather, like shoes and baseball gloves, sprouting warts and hair. Paschke’s human
subjects were sometimes hermaphroditic, and projected a confusing mixture of benevolence and malice. This sense of dubiousness lay at the heart of Paschke’s work, and reflected the latent violence that
he felt permeated his social and political environment.
cont.
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ED PASCHKE | cont.
By the 1980s, Paschke’s interest in ambiguity had extended beyond just the subject matter of his
paintings and into his style of representation. His work became increasingly abstract, eventually
reduced to lines of neon static floating among featureless faces hidden behind sunglasses and masks.
Distinctions between foreground and background disappeared, and the figures’ identities and intentions
were totally obscured. Paschke had always been interested in televisual imagery, and in this period
took it to a dark, lonely extreme. These paintings combined the confusing space of the screen –
simultaneously flat and deep – with the perplexing imagery of masked criminals and terrorists that the
television often depicted in the 1980s. They are hermetically sealed inside a broadcast universe lit only
by screens and neon, where no natural light can penetrate.
In 1982 Paschke was the subject of a retrospective organized by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago that traveled to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. In 1989 the Art Institute of Chicago organized another retrospective, which traveled to
the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Dallas Art Museum.
Paschke died in Chicago in 2004, at only 65 years old. Paschke’s work has continued to be frequently
shown, including in a major exhibition at Gagosian Gallery New York in 2012, curated by Paschke’s
former studio assistant, Jeff Koons. Paschke’s work is included in dozens of major public collections
around the world, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee d’Art Moderne Nationale in Paris, the National
Museum of Modern Art in Washington D.C., the Museum Moderner Kunst in Austria, and the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York.
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CHRISTINA RAMBERG | b. 1946 - d. 1995
Christina Ramberg was born in 1946 in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. She came to Chicago in the mid
1960s to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA in 1968.
While studying at SAIC, Ramberg and fellow artists Philip Hanson and Roger Brown particularly enjoyed
visiting the Maxwell Street flea markets to look for “trash treasures” like old toys and folk art. Ramberg
also began collecting comic strips, from which she clipped characters and shapes that caught her eye.
She meticulously cataloged these clippings by pasting them in scrapbooks grouped by common imagery, such as dark shadows or women crying into pillows. But she was not only interested in mass-produced
media – Ramberg also kept extensive visual archives of slides, clippings and her own sketches based on
medieval art, Indian miniature paintings, medical illustrations, vernacular sculpture and architecture, and
costume patterns, among many more.
By the time Ramberg graduated from SAIC, her fellow students in the Hairy Who had already held a
series of successful group shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, and curator Don Baum was hoping to
continue the model with a new set of young artists. He was recommended Ramberg, Hanson, Brown,
and Eleanor Dube by their professor Ray Yoshida. The exhibition would be called False Image.
Ramberg’s work from this early period employed references to the glossy perfection of women’s hairstyles in print advertising and comic books, as well as the unsettling displays of blemishes and diseases that she found in medical illustrations. Ramberg handled this imagery in a restrained, almost polite
manner that is never obscene, but always unsettlingly ambiguous and deeply disturbing.
The False Image show sealed Ramberg’s inclusion in the loose group of artists known as the Imagists.
She, Hanson, Brown, and Dube returned for another installment of the False Image in 1969, and Ramberg’s work also was shown in The Spirit of the Comics at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, also in 1969. She returned to SAIC as a graduate student, and received an MFA in 1973. During
these years, Ramberg was a part of all of the major Imagist museum shows, including Don Baum Says
“Chicago Needs Famous Artists” and Chicago Imagist Art at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art
(1969 and 1972), Surplus Slop from the Windy City at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970), and Made
in Chicago at the São Paolo Bienal (1973). Outside of these Imagist shows, her work was chosen for the
1972 and 1979 Whitney Biennials. From the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, Ramberg had regular solo
exhibitions at Phyllis Kind’s galleries in Chicago and New York.
Over the course of the 1970s, Ramberg’s work became increasingly monumental and refined. She
expanded her interest in glossy hair texture and began creating entire figures that appeared to be tightly
wrapped in hair. Others were bandaged or confined in restrictive undergarments. Although the paintings
themselves grew more ambitious and finely rendered, the figures within them were usually still missing
their faces and portions of their limbs. The faceless amputees of Ramberg’s paintings are a jarring reminder of how incomplete and even cruel representations of the female form in popular culture can be.
Ramberg returned to her alma mater as a painting instructor, and was the chair of SAIC’s painting and
drawing department from 1985 until 1989. Tragically, her life was cut short by neurological disease, and
she died in 1995 at the age of 49. Between her short life and meticulous painting practice, her body
of work is alarmingly small. Appreciation for her art has continued to grow since her death, with solo
exhibitions at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2000), Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York (2001),
and David Nolan Gallery in New York (2011).
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SUELLEN ROCCA | b. 1943: Lives & works in Chicago
Born in Chicago in 1943, Suellen Rocca enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago around
1960, receiving her BFA in 1964.
While still in college, Rocca met and married a jeweler, and began perusing his catalogs of gems and
settings. She became fascinated with the rows of similar representations of generic items that were
rendered in simple black and white yet fraught with promises of wealth and romantic satisfaction. At
the same time, Rocca also was looking at contemporary artists like William T. Wiley and Peter Saul,
who were known for their complicated and critical approach to popular culture. Given her interest in
comics and catalogs, Rocca was naturally intrigued by the Pop Art that was sweeping the New York
art scene, and which she saw in exhibitions at the Art Institute. Nonetheless, she preferred the more
nuanced approach of artists like Wiley and Saul to the cold straighforwardness of Andy Warhol and
Roy Lichtenstein.
In her own work, Rocca sought to explore popular culture through a personal lens, probing the nature
of her relationship to mass visual culture. Her early work combined the repetition and iconographic
qualities of catalog illustrations with her own idiosyncratic doodling style. She eventually began to add
color and create denser compositions, often with a large central figure surrounded or filled with floating
line drawings of people, palm trees, fingers, and shoes. Although there is no intentional feminist content in these paintings, Rocca’s autobiographical approach led to an emphasis on items associated
with women, including handbags, wigs, and jewelry.
With the encouragement of the Hyde Park Art Center’s director, Don Baum, she and five other artists
created the first Hairy Who exhibition in 1966. Its success spawned two more shows at HPAC with the
same group of artists in 1967 and 1968, and at venues across the country including the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Rocca’s work was included in most of the surveys of Imagist art that appeared around the world in the
1970s and 1980s, and beginning in the mid-1970s she was represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery. In 1993,
she became a program director at Hull House, a social service organization on Chicago’s near west
side, where she oversaw a program that coordinated visits by working artists to elementary schools. In
the past several years Rocca has returned to Elmhurst College as an instructor and as the curator and
director of exhibitions at the college’s extensive collection of Imagist artwork, and she maintains her
studio practice.
Rocca’s artwork continues to be included regularly in museum surveys of Chicago Imagism, including
recent exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin and Touch & Go: Ray
Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute. She was
part of a two-person exhibition with Art Green at Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in 2007. Her
artwork is held in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Madison Museum of Contemporary
Art, and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, among others.
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BARBARA ROSSI | b. 1940 : Lives & works in Chicago
Born in Chicago in 1940, Barbara Rossi attended St. Xavier College, graduating with a BA in 1964.
Rossi was raised Catholic, and had long planned to serve the church as a nun. She eventually decided
to also pursue a career as an artist, a decision that was fortuitously supported by the liberal policies of
the Catholic Church’s Vatican II. In 1968, with the Church’s blessing and financial support, Rossi enrolled
in the graduate painting program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her
MFA in 1970.
Because Rossi had not done her undergraduate studies at SAIC, she did not begin to associate herself
with the other Chicago Imagists until 1970, when Don Baum invited her to participate in the Marriage
Chicago Style exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center. Though Rossi was the newcomer, Baum’s instincts were correct: she was a perfect fit, both artistically and socially, with the rest of the Imagist
artists. Their free-ranging interests, collegial attitudes towards one another, and wacky senses of humor
appealed to Rossi, and were the foundation for the affinity amongst their artwork. She returned to
HPAC the following year to show in Chicago Antigua, the final installment of the original group of
HPAC-based Imagist group shows.
It was during her time as a graduate student at SAIC that Rossi was first exposed to Indian painting,
which became a lifelong personal and scholarly interest and led to her authoring From the Ocean
of Painting: India’s Popular Paintings, 1589 to the Present (1998, Oxford University Press). Rossi’s
paintings of the time were primarily abstract washes of flat, glowing color, but sprinkled with staring
eyeballs or bulbous noses that subtly came together to form face-like visages. She also began working
with reverse-painted Plexiglas, a medium that could provide the perfectly flat, clear, high-contrast
qualities that Rossi appreciated in Indian painting.
Rossi began experimenting with different media in the years after she finished her MFA. In particular,
she was fascinated with printmaking and traditional fabric arts. In 1970, she produced a series of single-color etchings on silky fabric, which she then stitched into quilts. Though this interest in sewing
and textiles emanated from her childhood, the Imagist reverence for craftsmanship, inspired in part
by artists like H.C. Westermann, reinforced Rossi’s natural tendencies towards meticulousness and the
vernacular arts. Even when she returned to painting, Rossi continued to treat her works as threedimensional objects, often incorporating feathers, sequins, hair, and custom-painted frames. Rossi also
began using fields of tiny dots, as in Australian Aboriginal painting, to render bulging body forms that
reflected Western art historical influences including Surrealism and German Expressionism.
In 1971 Rossi took a teaching position at SAIC, which she still holds today. In 1974, she began exhibiting
at Phyllis Kind Gallery, where her work was represented until the mid-1990s.
Rossi has continued to exhibit her work in group shows around the country, including at the Whitney
Museum in New York, the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin, the Terra Museum of American Art in
Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the
Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1991. Her work is in the collections of institutions
around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts Vienna.
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KARL WIRSUM | b. 1939 : Lives & works in Chicago
Karl Wirsum was born to a working class family of German immigrants on the northwest side of Chicago
in 1939. In 1957, Wirsum enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the late 1960s, Wirsum began incorporating his lifelong love of Chicago’s jazz and blues music in both
the style and content of his work. He admired the unpretentious quality of blues music, and sought to
reproduce its brash boldness in his paintings. Wirsum’s 1968 portrait of singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins as
a caped, bug-eyed, semi-transparent alien surrounded by green talking birds on a blood-red background
would eventually adorn the cover of one of Hawkins’s albums, and is one of Wirsum’s most famous works.
Wirsum also developed highly refined skills in the medium of reverse painting on glass and Plexiglas in
order to achieve perfectly flat, smooth, bright colors. He thought of himself as both a fine artist and a
craftsman, and identified with the tradition of skilled labor he saw practiced by his tradesmen parents
and contemporary artists like H.C. Westermann alike.
In 1966, Don Baum, the HPAC curator who had included Wirsum in his large group shows earlier in the
decade, recommended that he be included in the more focused Hairy Who group show that he was putting together with Jim Nutt. Wirsum was included in all three of the Hairy Who shows at HPAC in 1966,
1967, and 1968, and in subsequent shows with the group over the next several years at the Corcoran
Gallery in Washington D.C. and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He also returned to HPAC for
Marriage Chicago Style and Chicago Antigua in 1970 and 1971, respectively.
Wirsum’s electrifying work from the late 1960s and early 1970s is a masterful combination of elements:
the totemic symmetry of Aztec stone carving, the gleeful weirdness of old-fashioned tin toys, and the
abstracted gore of old medical illustrations are all rendered in the confident lines and strident coloration
that would become Wirsum’s trademark. His characters dance and vibrate across their canvas or glass
surfaces, emanating joy and insanity.
After the initial success of the Hairy Who shows in Chicago and elsewhere, Wirsum participated in the
series of Imagist group shows that followed, including Don Baum Says “Chicago Needs Famous Artists”
(1969), and Chicago Imagist Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1972), and Made in Chicago
(São Paulo Bienal and traveling show, 1973–74). Like some of his Imagist colleagues, Wirsum also was included in the 1968 Whitney Biennial and Human Concern / Personal Torment at the Whitney in 1969, and
The Spirit of the Comics at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia the same year.
In the 1970s, Wirsum began experimenting more with sculpture, allowing his characters to break the
bounds of the two-dimensional surface, and for his bold lines and shocking colors to envelop them on
all sides. He could also more fully explore the interests in costuming and masks that he had developed
while in Mexico and by studying the cultural artifacts on display at the Field Museum. Carved wood and
papier-mâché sculptures took on the feeling of idols or relics while costumes and masks mounted on
skeletal mannequins were like the evidence of some interplanetary cartoon-worshipping Wirsum-culture.
This body of work culminated in 1980 with a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art
with the punning, foreign-sounding title Hare Toddy Kong Tamari.
Wirsum continued to exhibit around the country and the world, with regular solo shows at Phyllis Kind’s
galleries in Chicago and New York through the mid-1990s. Wirsum’s art is in the collections of institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, the Smithsonian American Art Museum Washington D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
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RAY YOSHIDA | b. 1930 - d. 2009
Ray Yoshida was born in 1930 on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. He received his BFA from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953, an MFA from Syracuse University in 1958, after which he returned
to Chicago. During the 1960s, while most of the other Imagist artists were entering SAIC as undergraduate students, Yoshida was beginning his teaching career there, first as a part time instructor and then
as a full professor after 1971.
Yoshida is a unique figure in the history of Imagism because he was both a peer and a mentor to the
other artists in the group. Although they first encountered one another as teacher and student, Yoshida
was young enough to be a social and professional equal. So while many of the Imagists credit him as
an important source of wisdom and encouragement who helped them develop in class and the studio,
he was also a fellow artist honing his own practice at the same time. Yoshida taught Jim Nutt, Suellen
Rocca, Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Philip Hanson, among others.
In the early 1960s Yoshida had refined his style, creating compositions that were abstract but with a
three-dimensional, narrative quality. In the late 60s, around the time that the group of Yoshida’s students
who would eventually be labeled the Imagists were graduating from SAIC, Yoshida’s work made a leap.
Yoshida had long been interested in the aesthetic power of popular culture, including comics, and in 1967
he began making assemblages and eventually collages using clippings from comic books. They ranged
from snippets collaged in neat rows on white paper, to surreal creatures created by re-combining body
parts and items from different parts of the comics. For Yoshida, these sources were a bottomless pit of
inspiration, constantly providing new ways of looking at the world and of making images.
While not an exhibiting member of any of the original Imagist group shows at the Hyde Park Art
Center in the late 1960s, Yoshida was included in many of the subsequent museum shows throughout
the late 1960s and 1970s, which spread news of Imagism across the world and cemented the group’s
reputation in contemporary art. In 1975, Yoshida also began showing with Phyllis Kind Gallery, along
with many of the other Imagists.
Yoshida counseled his students on drawing inspiration from all aspects of their environment. He
encouraged them to visit flea markets, in particular Maxwell Street on Chicago’s near south side,
and to collect “trash treasures” like commercial ephemera and folk art that possessed a refreshing
directness. Yoshida led by example, filling his home with his own treasures. Roger Brown in particular
took Yoshida’s lesson to heart, creating a remarkable installation of his own collection in his home in
Lincoln Park.
Yoshida’s paintings in the late 1960s and 1970s show how the Imagist sensibility was able to manipulate
and expand upon the promise of popular art. For Yoshida and his students and colleagues, contemporary visual culture was not something to be mocked or borrowed, but a rich vocabulary that could be
utilized and enlarged upon in a seemingly endless variety of ways. Over the course of the 1970s Yoshida’s
cont.
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RAY YOSHIDA | cont.
weird floating shapes and bands of color eventually congealed into more explicitly narrative work, usually
featuring faceless figures with striped robe-like costumes and tentacles for hands. The vaguely domestic
spaces of these works – decorated with potted plants and window treatments – were not unlike those of
comic strips, but the boneless characters that inhabited them were wholly of Yoshida’s own mind.
Yoshida continued teaching at SAIC for four decades. He was recognized with a retrospective at
Chicago’s N.A.M.E. Gallery in 1984 and another in 1998 that originated at the Contemporary Museum in
Honolulu and traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center. He died in Hawaii in 2009. His legacy was explored
in Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence at the Sullivan Galleries of the SAIC in 2011.
The majority of Yoshida’s extensive personal art collection was donated by his family to the Kohler Art
Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where it was shown in a major exhibition in 2012. Yoshida’s work is also
held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the
Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts in Vienna, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.
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