Chicago artist Art Green, a founding member of the Imagist art group the Hairy Who, died on April 14th at 83. Garth Greenan Gallery, which represents the artist, announced his death on Instagram, writing, “His legacy lives on in his playful and paradoxical paintings, and in the generation of artists shaped by his decades of dedicated teaching.”
Green filled his paintings with unruly, contradictory images, layering motifs such as ice cream cones, flames, or dancing legs, with kaleidoscopic patterns and sharp-edged geometries. In the 1960s, he emerged alongside School of the Art Institute of Chicago peers James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum, helping to form the irreverent collective that became known as the Hairy Who. Unlike New York Pop artists like Andy Warhol, who approached post-war American life with irony, the Hairy Who responded with a more visceral rejection of its hollow optimism.
Born in Frankfort, Indiana in 1941, Green graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1965. He first enrolled as an industrial design student, moving on to graphic design before finally landing on painting. After graduating, Green and his five collaborators mounted their first exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966. The group presented five additional exhibitions between 1966 and 1969—two in Chicago and one each in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.—helping to draw national attention to the broader Chicago Imagist movement.
In 1969, Green was offered a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. He married fabric designer Natalie Novotny, whose work inspired the thread and lace imagery seen in many of Green’s paintings. Starting in the 1970s, Green’s work reflected the flat style of the period, animated by a riot of color, but it also absorbed a deeper strain of Surrealist influence than his counterparts, drawing from the work of artists like René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico.
A prime example of all of his influences is the painting Restricted Entry (1974), which depicts an ice cream cone torn open like wallpaper to reveal flames. The painting also features tight stitches across a wood-paneled and windowed background. With Green’s precise, graphic style, the painting creates a surreal clash between everyday, safe-seeming objects and the violent chaos of his composition.
Green accepted another teaching position at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, where he worked until 2006. Over the last few decades, he was the subject of solo exhibitions at Garth Greenan Gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, and Waterloo Art Gallery, among others. His work is held by a number of prestigious collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the MCA Chicago, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
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