Art Green (1941–2025)
180April 25, 2025
Art Green, an original member of a rabblerousing group of artists known asthe Hairy Whoand a key figure in the Chicago Imagist movement, died on April 14. He was eighty-three. His death was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represented him. Green in the mid-1960s was a recent art-school graduate when he founded the Hairy Who in Chicago alongside fellow grads James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. United by little more than friendship and a passion for representational painting, the group quickly became known for their bright, bold, and often grotesque works, which were in lively contrast to the slick, more salable work of New York artists of the time such as James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. Heavily influenced by Chicago’s culture and architecture and by the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Green was known for witty, hallucinogenic paintings blending Pop and surrealist elements. His avowed goal, he said, was to create works that “hit you in the eyes.”Arthur Green was born May 13, 1941, in Frankfort, Indiana. His father was a self-taught civil engineer who worked for the railroad; his mother was an avid quilter. Immersed in the Midwestern car culture of the era, Green at first intended to be an industrial designer but on enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago shifted his major to graphic design. Discovering a dearth of classes in that discipline, he shifted to painting, graduating in 1965. Though like many artists of his generation he was originally drawn to Abstract Expressionism, he turned toward surrealism after encountering the work of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, both of which were represented in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Green was especially intrigued by de Chirico’s metaphysical period, and his interest would inform his work, which frequently centered tropes of postwar and contemporary advertising—such as ice cream cones, women’s painted fingernails or stockinged legs, and zippers—in complex and stratified spaces. “I aspired to make paintings that were awkward and monstrous, boring and familiar,” he would later write.
In 1966, under the moniker the Hairy Who, which was evocative of the names of rock bands at the time, Green, Falconer, Nilsson, Nutt, Rocca, and Wirsum mounted the first of a series of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago’s South Side. The group would stage a total of six informal shows by the end of 1969: three in Chicago and one apiece in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC. Though the work of each of the six artists was distinct, the Hairy Who shared a unique sense of humor, tremendous technical skill, a commitment to progressive ideas, and a fascination with the tensions generated by America’s love affair with consumerism and pop culture, its immersion in the Vietnam War, and its reckoning with the civil rights movement.
Among the works that exemplify Green’s early oeuvre are 1968’sDisclosing Enclosure, depicting a human face opened like a flower by bisecting zippers to reveal a flaming soft-serve cone; 1969’sImmoderate Abstention, featuring a large pair of scissors that appears trapped between a billowing conflagration and a window, whose open drapes reveal a serene moonlit seascape; andRegulatory Body, also 1969, which presents a waffle cone whose creamy contents are distressingly clamped in a set of electric-blue gears, above which hovers a gaping maw seemingly constructed of peanuts, caramel, and chocolate.
In the 1970s, Green become increasingly interested in trompe l’oeil. Around this time, he began focusing on close-ups of hands andfingernailsas well as details such aswood grain. The 1980s brought an interest in the Necker cube, an optical illusion in which a two-dimensional drawing of a cube is perceived as having three dimensions and two possible spatial orientations. Green remembered the pattern from his mother’s quilts. “I was intrigued by the possibilities of simultaneously representing all sides of a rotating cube,” he wrote. “I incorporated tiling patterns of unfolded cubes along with the hypercube in my work.”
His later works continued to astound with their carefully devised strata. “Made with a meticulous touch in luminous, confectionary colors, his new paintings assert a kaleidoscopic complexity whose order takes considerable time to figure out,” wrote Ken Johnson in theNew York Times, reviewing a 2009 exhibition of Green’s work. “On star-, diamond-, circle- and otherwise eccentrically shaped panels—as well as on rectangular ones—representations of ceramic tiles, panes of glass, pieces of masking tape, interwoven colored ovals and wood-grained inner frames are intricately layered. . . . Green’s paintings conflate contradictory illusions to visually gripping, mind-stretching effect.”
“I have been trying to make layered paintings that take a long time to ‘see,’” Green explained in 2005. “I want to encourage the viewer to be conscious of the (usually unconscious) process of the interpretation and construction of images in the mind.”
Flowing alongside Green’s artistic practice was his career as a teacher, which he launched fresh out of college, teaching seventh grade in Chicago public schools. Stints as a professor at Chicago City College, Kendall College of Art and Design, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design followed. In 1977, he began teaching at the University of Waterloo in Stratford, Ontario, where he twice chaired the fine arts department and from which he retired as professor emeritus in 2006; in 2005, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Green’s work is held in the collections of museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia; and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.
Despite continuing his artistic practice to critical acclaim in recent years, Green, like many artists whose careers endure, was often asked to reckon with the distance from his earliest glory days. Responding to a 2015 query from curator Lanny Silverman on this topic for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, he offered a modest and delightful reply. “If I was a package of doughnuts, I’d never be sold,” he said. “But the doughnuts are still good.”