Chicago Imagists get their due in Indy

Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields

by Dan Grossman

When I saw Karl Wirsum’s “Lesser of Two Evils” in Private Eye at Newfields, I felt a shock of recognition. I had the feeling, looking at the symmetrical sphinx-like figures in this painting awash in luminescent colors, that I was looking into a kaleidoscope reflecting back both the history of Mesoamerican art and Looney Tunes. But I was also looking at the kaleidoscope of my own past. That is, I clearly remember seeing Wirsum’s “PlugBug '' mural located on the east side of the Holabird and Root ComEd Substation building in downtown Chicago. This was in 1994, during one of my infrequent trips to the city, and “Lesser of Two Evils”, painted in a similar style, made me recall it.

Private Eye features more than 120 works of art from 46 artists. The core group of these artists had, by the mid-70s, become known as the Chicago Imagists. Their work is featured with selections from Chicago artists who preceded them, as well as artists influenced by them. (And you don’t have long to see it, as the exhibition closes Dec. 5.)

An exhibition of this scope is long overdue. As stated in Leslie Buckbinder’s 2014 film, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, “The story of 20th-century art is already written. It is not about Chicago.” That is, no Chicago art movement ever leapt into national consciousness the way, say, the Abstract Expressionists did. This is a state of affairs the Indianapolis exhibition aims to correct, according to Charles Venable, the former museum director. As he notes in the exhibition catalog, this group remains understudied with the “spotlight shin[ing] primarily on the art that emerged from contemporaneous East Coast Pop and West Coast Funk movements.” Venable notes that this exhibition largely consists of Imagist work recently promised to the museum. Venable, you may recall, resigned from Newfields in February 2021 after posting a job listing seeking a director who would maintain the museum’s “traditional, core, white art audience.” The resulting outrage to this posting made his continuing as director untenable.

This showing of Imagist work that Venable helped facilitate comes at a fraught time for the museum, and not just because of the job listing controversy. Under Venable’s direction, the museum permanently closed its contemporary galleries in early 2021 — the entire fourth floor — to make room for the digital art exhibition the LUME, which is currently showing the Van Gogh immersive virtual reality experience organized by the Australian-based Grande Experiences. For patrons of the museum wondering about the museum’s commitment to contemporary art, notwithstanding the plan to integrate contemporary works into its permanent galleries, the expansive Private Eye exhibition might provide some comfort.

The wall text succinctly relates the history of the Chicago Imagists’ coming together as a group. Art Institute grad Jim Nutt is singled out as the prime mover in the their story. After he met his future wife, fellow artist Gladys Nilsson at the Institute in the early 1960s, they started teaching children’s art classes at the Hyde Park Art Center. Along with another artist, James Falconer, they convinced the center’s director of exhibitions Don Baum to hold a group show which would also feature fellow artists Suellen Rocca, Art Green, and the aforementioned Karl Wirsum. This group of exhibitors appropriated the name of their group show “Hairy Who?”, a name coined by Wirsum that would forever be associated with the Imagists as a group.

Many of the artists resisted being lumped together under one moniker. However, John Corbett, in his essay “Mommy, what’s an Imagist?” (included in the catalogue) makes the case that they shared a set of stylistic preferences. “None of these painters were lumpy painters,” Corbett writes. “They were averse to impasto. Application of paint or whatever support they put it onto was thin with a smooth finish.” They were not, in other words, painterly painters. Accordingly, the first references that come to my mind when looking at their work are often not art historical, but pop-cultural.

This is certainly the case with Nutt, whose “Weenie Toung” made me recall, of all things, the early 90s animated series Beavis and Butthead. With its stylized portrayal of a cartoonish male subject in profile sporting a blonde pompadour, with a purple hot dog tongue in mouth — with a word balloon rising from his ear canal reading “EAT” — the painting channels the world of comic books.

Comic books are big influences for the Imagists, but not so much in the duplication vein of Roy Lichtenstein. Take Roger Brown’s “The Diner,” a three-dimensional painted construction in the shape of a diner (acrylic on metal and wood) that clearly recalls Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Yet the figures seated inside are painted in an abstracted cartoon style. Brown sometimes paints in a more apocalyptic vein. In “Chicago Hit by the Bomb” you also see the silhouettes of multiple figures in the windows of apartment buildings throwing up their arms in panic or despair while the clouds congeal into blood-red cotton candy patterns over Lake Michigan that stretch towards the horizon. In “Fisherman with their Wives and Reflections” Brown abandons a horizon line altogether in favor of an eerie landscape of pathways along parallel canals. In the water you see distant figures reflected, along with the candy-cane patterned sky. There is both campiness and pathos in Brown’s work, as well as disquiet. The geometrical patterns in his landscapes reflect how humankind has altered the natural environment in the age of the Anthropocene globally. But his parabolically-patterned “Winter Storm” lakescape makes me think of the impact more locally; the industrialization on the southern Lake Michigan shore.

Abandon all hope of witnessing any kind of naturalism in this exhibition. In Gladys Nilsson’s “Layered Playc” (acrylic on canvas) there are multiple creatures in bright vivid colors; there’s a snake swirling around a tree and an amoeba-like human form; it’s unclear if you’re looking through the window of a zoo or the lens of a microscope. Her portraits of people aren’t any less menagerie-like. Consider “Summer Porch” (watercolor and gouache on paper) where the humanoid forms take on fruit-like shapes and and colors.

While the Imagists largely painted clearly identifiable subject matter, some of them got pretty abstract in their compositions. Consider Frank Piatek’s painting “St. Matthew II Winter Cycle” (oil on canvas) which, at first glance, might seem bereft of subject. But then you see that the fleshiness of the forms resemble interlocked limbs and other appendages (perhaps indicating the inevitable, and paradoxically erotic, result of saintly celibacy).

“St. Matthew II Winter Cycle” by Frank Piatek

The Imagists were big on humor. Edgy humor, in the case of Suellen Rocca. Consider her painting “Night Light” (oil on canvas) where, sandwiched by two abstracted female forms you see a cartoonish penis spurting out a wad of semen in the shape of a palm tree. In her work, the motifs transcend individual paintings. Consider also her “Lovely Handbag” where the composition features a depiction of a handbag. On the handbag itself you see the design of a man gifting a handbag to a woman, alluding perhaps to the transactional nature of romantic relationships. You also see in the background, driving this point home, the gusher of semen image from “Nightlight” and what appears to be the portrait of a woman framed by a semen stain.

Unsubtle sexual humor — humor with a surrealist bent — is on view in Ed Paschke’s “Holescape” where a shoe becomes a vehicle for various human orifices on a Daliesque plain stretching towards a horizon line, a plain punctured by anuses at regular intervals. In other paintings, Paschke comes close to traditional portraiture. His luminously psychedelic “Sylvester” featuring an androgynous figure wearing a stage costume and streaks of blue laser light in the background. “Imagist” might ultimately be too reductive a term to describe Paschke — and the other artists likewise branded — but it’s a term that stuck.

Indeed, the label “Imagist” has continued to have currency well into the 21st century, and the impact of this group of artists has been felt in Indianapolis. Perhaps their most notable impact was on a group of six artists — Ally Alsup, Brock Forrer, Emily Gable, Paul Pelsue, Ashley Windbigler and Adam Wollenberg — collectively known as The Droops, who met as students at the Herron School of Art & Design around 2009. In addition to having exhibited their work together in such spaces as Tube Factory, City Gallery, and the (now) defunct General Public Collective, they also often painted individual canvases as a collective. One of their collective paintings, “Soft Serve,” was featured in the 200 Years of Indiana Art exhibit at the Indiana State Museum in 2016.

The Imagist aesthetic was also absorbed by Kyle Herrington, the former curator at the Indianapolis Art Center who organized a notable show called “Doing it Themselves” in 2015 featuring the likes of Erin K. Drew and Nathaniel Russell. (“I don’t think I specifically mentioned the Chicago Imagists but they were definitely in my web of influence in constructing the artists I selected for the show,” he told me.)

As a longtime resident of (Greater) Indianapolis, a city that sits farther afield from the art world hubs than Chicago, it pleases me that “Private Eye” both highlights Midwestern artists and serves as a corrective to the dominant art history discourse.

Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art is on view at Newfields through Dec. 5, 2021.

Chicago Imagists get their due in Indy

A homecoming for artist Terry Copen

‘Voodoo Macbeth’ at Heartland Film