Artist and Hairy Who member Gladys Nilsson in 1966, holding one of the group’s exhibition catalogues in comic-book form (1966)
(photo by Bill Arsenault, courtesy Pentimenti Productions)
(photo by Bill Arsenault, courtesy Pentimenti Productions)
Film Screening
Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists
Friday, September 26, 7:30pm
$10 Members, $12 Non-Members
Purchase Online or Call 203.966.9700 x 22 for tickets
Chicago-Style Modern Art With Everything:
In the mid 1960s, the city of Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of young artists. Collectively known
as the Imagists, they showed in successive waves of exhibitions with monikers that might have been psychedelic rock
bands of the era—Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style. Kissing cousins to the
contemporaneous international phenomenon of Pop Art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face
tack. Variously pugnacious, puerile, scatological, graphic, comical, and absurd, it celebrated a very different
version of ‘popular’ from the detached cool of New York, London and Los Angeles. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists
is the first film to tell their wild, woolly, utterly irreverent story.
In the mid 1960s, the city of Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of young artists. Collectively known
as the Imagists, they showed in successive waves of exhibitions with monikers that might have been psychedelic rock
bands of the era—Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style. Kissing cousins to the
contemporaneous international phenomenon of Pop Art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face
tack. Variously pugnacious, puerile, scatological, graphic, comical, and absurd, it celebrated a very different
version of ‘popular’ from the detached cool of New York, London and Los Angeles. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists
is the first film to tell their wild, woolly, utterly irreverent story.
