The Chicago Imagist Print: Ten Artists' Works, 1958-1987

4 October–6 December 1987

Roger Brown, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, and Karl Wirsum, who were students together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created a visual style that came to be known as Chicago Imagism. Chicago Imagism is characterized by the use of intense, bright colors in portraying nontraditional and highly personal images that interpret, rather than mimic what the artist sees. The Chicago Imagists have been concerned specifically with various aspects of everyday life, and their works reflect the styles of comics, commercial ads, billboards, folk art, and the vernacular nature of American culture, specifically that of Chicago and its neighborhoods. The Imagists were first exhibited together at the Hyde Park Art Center in the mid 1960s. The work on display at the Smart Gallery will show a wide range of techniques and processes – screen printings, lithography, etching, drypoint, engraving and woodcut – that reflect the Imagists’ respect for printmaking as a primary artistic vehicle, rather than simply as a method of reproducing art.

The exhibition of more than 325 artworks was made possible by a large grant from the Hyde Park Bank and Trust Company, as well as funding from the national Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. 

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