Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists

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. https://www.pentimentiproductions.org/

A lavishly-illustrated romp through Chicago Imagist art: the Second City scene that challenged Pop Art’s status quo in the 1960s, then faded from view. Forty years later, its funk and grit inspires artists from Jeff Koons to Chris Ware, making the Imagists the most famous artists you never knew.

Directed by Leslie Buchbinder, a Pentimenti Productions film

Image credit: Gladys Nilsson, 1966 (Photo by Bill Arsenault)

Submitted by Harrison Sherrod, Pentimenti Productions