Leon Golub “Trio” 1955. Lithograph on cream wove paper, 19 15/16 × 26 1/8 in. The Art Institute of Chicago,, Harold Joachim Purchase Fund, 1967.534
Part of the Art in Chicago feature, a guide to Chicago art institutions, galleries and movements for collectors, curators and the curious.
Chicago’s art movements over the years have repeatedly displayed an urgency, vim and uniqueness that allows them to stand alone; in any context; measured by any standard. It’s a fact not regularly celebrated externally, given the willful and active resistance from other places—notably New York and Los Angeles—to see Chicago and its art. But for those who know of it, who are steeped in it or happen upon it, there is little doubting the city’s art vibrancy and depth of heritage; its quality and scale.
“There’s a vibe in Chicago,” says John Corbett, of the gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey, and he’s right; there is a palpable energy to art production in the city which, distinct from other areas of artistic renown, feels visceral rather than commercial, as if making art here is an existential need. “It comes from the fact that Chicago has great institutional representation, great artists, great collectors and a high caliber of museums, alongside an underdeveloped commercial infrastructure,” says Corbett. “Simply put, we’re not going to wait for anyone else to do this for us.”
It is a fact made evident through the genesis of various now highly recognizable movements, collectives and developed aesthetics across the last hundred years and more, each emerging from particular social groupings and geographies in the city, responding to a particular set of preconditions, always rooted to the local landscape.
Ted Halkin “Birds” 1957, oil on board, 25 x 31 inches. Courtesy the Estate of Ted Halkin and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. Ted Halkin was one of the original members of the Monster Roster.
Corbett references Chicago’s first indigenous movement as being the Monster Roster. “Others had made work in groups but participated in national or international language.” Bauhaus had come to Chicago, and nationally there was the federal government’s Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1943, which provided work for unemployed artists who would then focus on national narratives. “But these were engaged in a broader discourse. What happens with the Monster Roster is that artists come back from World War II and they [had] a collective response to the horrors of that moment, and start to produce agonistic, existential work.”
It was the late 1940s, and despite the fact that the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists had been founded in 1922, the art landscape was still dominated by conservative selection tribunals. At the same time, several students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—much to the embarrassment of their teachers—were selected by jurors from outside the city who had come to preside over the Annual Watercolor Exhibition and the American Exhibition, and these teachers petitioned to disallow their participation. It inspired ire and resistance. In response, artist Leon Golub helped organize as well as make work for the seminal Momentum Exhibitions of 1948/9, an independent art exhibition featuring Chicago artists, which explicitly allowed the emerging generation to participate.
Portrait of Dominick Di Meo. Courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago
“So what you have with the likes of Golub, Dominick Di Meo, Cosmo Campoli and others,” says Corbett, “is artists who emerge from concrete sets of shared experience, namely the atrocities of war multiplied by the charged microcosmic environment of the art world. Monster Roster didn’t just materialize out of thin air, but from a very specific set of arguments within Chicago.”
Leon Golub photographed in the 1950s in front of two paintings from his “Philosophers” series. Courtesy The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts
William Faulkner is remembered for writing that the past is never dead, but not even past. In Chicago, there is an inescapable sense that the art movements that came before still pulse through the veins of the city’s self-awareness, and certainly its art-awareness. Perhaps this is historical—the measure of a literate audience—but it could just as well be that Chicago offers a unique, ongoing set of preconditions which recurringly generate a screw-this-let’s-get-it-done DIY energy; preconditions to a rise-up cultural production.
Perhaps, after all, its enemy is in fact its friend.
Gladys Nilsson at the opening of Hairy Who II, Chicago, 1967. Courtesy of the artist.
On the cover of the now-defunct Chicago Daily News’ Panorama magazine from March 11, 1967, there is a picture of five figures, in a variety of outfits, leaping into the air in lively poses. The banner reads “NEW CHICAGO ART ROCKS WITH EXCITEMENT,” and underneath the image, a second headline: “THE HAIRY WHOS ARE JUMPING WITH VITALITY.” The image captures a pushing-through art moment, and the springtime of what is now regarded as one of the legendary groupings in Chicago art history.
On the far right of the picture, Gladys M. Nilsson is leaping high, showing stockings, which she would later explain was an accident, as neither her nor fellow artist Suellen Rocca considered the effect of gravity versus resistance on how the shot would turn out. “It was fun,” she says, echoing the unabashed essence of the group.
The others, from left to right, are Karl Wirsum, Art Green, Rocca in the center, and Jim Nutt, Nilsson’s partner, who she met in the cafe at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960. Jim Falconer, the sixth member of the Hairy Who, was not in the shot.
Gladys Nilsson and Jim Nutt in their Lake View apartment in the 1960s. Photograph by Jim Falconer. Courtesy of the artist.
“It was the early- to mid-sixties,” says Nilsson, “and we were all young artists participating in whatever large exhibitions that might have been around town… not that many, as venues weren’t exactly available… One was the Hyde Park Art Center… Nutt and I each had a children’s art class there, and we knew Don Baum, director of the HPAC—he’d hired us, having gotten to know us and our work. Baum liked to include younger artists amid the older, more established in-the-theme shows. These shows were a lot of fun, and it was great to be in them. It would be thirty to thirty-five artists with one work each… As an emerging artist, this was great, although it’s hard to have viewers see what one’s work is all about with only one piece to ponder. Don was always looking for ideas on new, interesting shows for the gallery, and would often ask and /listen to artists for these exhibition thoughts.”
Two of the artists who would pitch ideas to Baum were Jim Nutt and Jim Falconer, who met at SAIC and remained friends. “At times they’d have thoughts of groupings,” says Nilsson, “and they started to put together lists of five individuals that were related, looking good on a wall together… Five artists would give the opportunity to have more works in a show, but not have the responsibility of a whole gallery like a one-person show.” So Nutt took the lists to Baum, who liked the idea, too, and “after looking the lists over, selected one, and said to add Wirsum to it as six was a better number than five.”
Gladys Nilsson “High Kicks,” 1965. Acrylic on board with artist’s frame, 49 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches (NILPT079). Courtesy of the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.
The group was given a time slot, money to make a comic—which the HPAC would sell—but they still didn’t have a name, a topic which would come up repeatedly as they met to formulate ideas. “It led to all kinds of late-night jocularity. At different points, things other than the show would come up, various exhibitions; gossip; movies,” and in one exploratory moment, “someone asked if we’d all caught Harry’s latest broadcast on the WFMT. This was Harry Bouras, a Chicago artist who also had a radio show where he’d talk about art, have people on and so on. Karl didn’t know it, and said ‘Harry who??’, whereupon we all burst out laughing. We decided it had a certain ring to it, for our name, but changed the spelling to ‘Hairy Who’ as more fitting to our works.”
It was a “the-rest-is-history” moment. The show was a hit, critically and with local audiences, who recognized the moment. There was a hum to the action, “the comic sold like hotcakes,” and the Hairy Who were suddenly a thing. This was 1966, and each show had an event vibe, with lively openings, a trademark punch which was served, and even costumes at one event. The collective would have ensuing shows at HPAC in 1967 and 1968, and, in the words of Nilsson, “The last one is the one everybody remembers… We’d linoleumed the walls, installed brightly painted woodwork, and had a glass display case with our ephemera in it, another with Karl’s papier-mâché work—it was terrific.”
Chicago could not contain the group. In 1968 there was a show at the San Francisco Art Institute school, and then in 1969, another show at the Corcoran gallery in the District of Columbia, followed by a final show at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Gladys Nilsson “Untitled,” 1968. Watercolor on paper, 7 x 10 1/2 inches (NILPP098). Courtesy of the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.
“In total, there were six Hairy Who shows, four comics, and at that point we were more of a mind to pursue our individual needs as artists; after all, six exhibitions in four years was a lot to deal with, time to step back.” There is a wistfulness to Nilsson’s tone, not so much a yearning for time past as the fact that looking back across a three-generation period, the images belong to another lifetime, and only the memory of what was felt remains.
“Our work was good, and we were lucky to be in the right place at the right time, with the right folk being receptive to what we did,” Nilsson says. “There were several other groups that went on to having shows at HPAC as well. Nutt and I moved to California in sixty-eight, so several of the shows were combinations of those remaining in Chicago, Hairy Who and other young artists. We missed seeing these, unfortunately, but all of our works were related. Looking back, it was a terrific time, wonderful and bizarre. Sixty-plus years, a long time ago, and the list of absent friends grows ever long.”
Other collectives which emerged in parallel to the Hairy Who include The False Image (Roger Brown, Philip Hanson, Christina Ramberg and Eleanor Dube) and the Nonplussed Some (also featuring Brown, Hanson and Ramberg, as well as Ed Paschke, Saran Canright, Ed Flood, Richard Wetzel and Barbara Rossi). Collectively, all these groups would come to be known as the Chicago Imagists, a term considered to have been coined by critic Franz Schulze.
The truth, though, is that these were exhibition groups of individual artists, rather than an art movement as such. Whatever they were, however, they were certainly “a moment,” says Corbett. “They were charismatic, wild, self-promoting. Some would become the most important artists in the history of Chicago, but it was never a collective. They were always individuals, and over time, they moved further and further apart.”
John Corbett
The Catch-22 in writing about the past is that the critical eye has a tendency to try to make sense of what has gone before, and in order to do that, at distance, the instinct is to unify. “This-is-this” and “that-is-that.” The collector’s gaze. How do you make sense of things without labels, without order?
“It’s why we started the gallery,” says Corbett of his space, itself now a Chicago art institution with more than a whiff of renown and mythology to it. “There were no adequate forces being marshalled to tell or analyze the story of Chicago’s art; it had been simplified and taken away from its context.” There was this pervading sense of “a zeitgeist, of there being something in the water, but the fact is that there were things going on that create the circumstances that generate the movements. In understanding the work we also had to understand what the environment was like.” Some of it was psychogeographic: “Old Town, for instance, “was a locus of activity starting in the forties. H.C. Westermann lived there, as did Francis Chapin—who does not get the credit he deserves as a teacher.”
Corbett regularly returns to particular moments in the undervalued legacy of teachers through the twentieth century, including Eleanor Coen and Max Kahn, an “indomitable artistic couple of the forties and fifties, cultivating and spreading print techniques they learned in Mexico a decade earlier.”
Enforced ordering is not the only trap for the collecting brain. A corollary trip-hazard is the tendency to organize by historicizing around “the most extreme contexts” of manifestations, and ignoring “the more conservative forces within a place which help ground it.” says Corbett. In that way, and related others, there is inevitably collateral damage to the accuracy of stories and contexts which underpin periods of art history in the city.
“We’ve seen important figures get written out,” he says. Consequently, the focus of Corbett vs. Dempsey has been “an attempt to look at a movement but also a less-understood aspect of a movement. We started looking and trying to understand,” and in that way not just show work from the past, but “generate an argument.”
Among the problematic terms which feature in Chicago’s art history is Afrofuturism, a term first used by Mark Dery in a 1994 article, although the concept existed long before it was given a critical identity. Regarded as a philosophical and interdisciplinary genre blending the experience, culture and history of the African diaspora with a projection toward imagined, science-fiction futures, the very act of giving it a label holds the term below the waterline. First and foremost, “assuming that African American experience and representation during a period is unitary is deeply flawed,” says John Corbett, adding that “making these assertions” and naming from the outside-in necessarily adds its own, renewed, “historic violence” onto a context—“we have to be more mindful.”
There is also a functional complication, as “art moves fast and responds to various aspects of being described and categorized; as soon as something is defined, someone tries to do something different—they zig to a zag.” But ultimately the backlash against the term has “to do with self-determination, about who gets to name,” and the blind spots involved in “externally labelling a marginalized group,” alongside “other—more substantive—arguments about whether it’s useful as a term at all.”
None of which takes away from the fact that there was a movement which pivoted from the arrival of the interstellar bandleader Sun Ra in Chicago in 1946, pioneering avant-garde sounds, blending music, race and radical ideas across the city’s jazz clubs. “What’s interesting is that Sun Ra is there in the fifties,” says Corbett, in a Chicago which was still systematically segregated, and “he starts coming up with a set of tenets that tease out problematic issues between future and past and how it relates to Afro-American culture. But it’s more of a phenomenon than a movement, and relates to people who were in dialogue with and inspired by Sun Ra.”
Sun Ra left Chicago in 1961, and yet African American sociopolitical cultural manifestation across the city continued to be a seminal branch of discourse. Whether the Mural Movement (including the 1967 Wall of Respect mural of the Black Arts Movement, an art school closely linked to the broader Black Power Movement), pioneering institutions such as the DuSable Museum of African American History (founded 1961), the ongoing historic presence of the South Side Community Art Center, or the AfriCOBRA collective (established in 1968), there is little doubt that Chicago of the sixties was a key point of cultural presentation and resistance for Black communities.
Nor did it end there. Decades later, artist Cauleen Smith moved to Chicago in 2011 specifically to produce work inspired by Sun Ra and his legacy on Afrofuturism. Then there’s Kerry James Marshall and his Black superhero comics, Nick Cave’s highly distinctive, wearable Soundsuits, a response to racial profiling, and the hyper-influential and active Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in 1965, which played an enormous role as a movement of its own.
“The point is,” says Corbett, “it was in the air, and the question is ‘What are the bounds?’” and by definition, are we asking the right questions at all, or “Is this being done to package?”
Gladys Nilsson “More Sleves,” 1968. Watercolor on paper, 3 7/8 x 5 3/8 inches (NILPP067). Courtesy of the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.
Across all contexts, what is remembered is an accident of history as much as anything else. For every group that is fêted and historicized, there are others relegated to footnotes, or which have disappeared altogether from the record.
Between the Monster Roster and the Chicago Imagists, for instance, Corbett highlights forgotten interim groups that included Robert Barnes and Ellen Lanyon, who “began to see fantasy elements that would become important to the sixties Imagists.” Then there are the likes of Richard Loving, member of the Allusive Abstractionist group of Chicago painters, who have only experienced “a re-assertion” alongside the rise “as a posthumous force” of one of its co-founders, Miyoko Ito. And this is without even going into the inevitable reaction against the Imagists, which included artists Tony Tasset and Jeanne Dunning, with exhibitions at the Randolph Street Gallery and the N.A.M.E. Gallery.
“Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality,” writes Dominic A. Pacyga in his 2009 biography of the city.
In the act of looking back—of condensing—what’s curious is that none of these distinct art imaginings feel dated in any meaningful way. The trauma of conflict multiplied by art injustice of the post-war era, for instance, and which fed the emergence of the Monster Roster, could just as easily make sense today, and the importance of Afrofuturism—whatever the flaws with the term—perhaps stand in ever more stark relief given the ongoing inability of society to reshape itself around unfeigned justice and equality, an entire three generations on from Sun Ra’s assertion that only in the exceptional world of science fiction could these basic tenets tangibly exist. And now, perhaps more than ever, how these times could do with the unbridled joy and sense of possibility that the Chicago Imagists brought to the city.
What we’re faced with at the moment, says Corbett, acting as something between historian and seer, is “the contrary motion of a new set of exclusionary forces.” And although it is of course hard to analyze the now, and movements tend to emerge in hindsight, what unites almost all of Chicago’s art “movements” to the present is the question of “how can we make what we’ve learned about those pernicious forces stick,” because undoubtedly, whatever else we know about this moment, it is that “there are things we can identify and fight against.”
If the pulse of art in Chicago teaches us anything, maybe it’s exactly this; that across the city’s art production there is—and always has been—resistance, solidarity, and, damn right, defiance.
Published in the print edition of the February-March 2026 issue, with the headline “From the Monster Roster to the Modern Moment: Chicago Art Movements Over The Years.”
