Hairy Who Catalog (1969), Washington, D.C. : Corcoran Gallery of Art (image from http://momalibrary.tumblr.com)

This Sunday, July 13, at 356 Mission in Los Angeles, they will be screening the documentary Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, introduced by Ricky Swallow. The event is free and begins at 8:30PM sharp.

I’ve always loved the colorful, fantastical, and highly stylized work of artists like Jim Nutt and Christina Ramberg. I’m very excited to see this new documentary film, which will give an overview of this art movement based in Chicago in the 1960s. Watch the official trailer here.

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.

The Hairy Who Sideshow (1967) Chicago : Hyde Park Art Center (image from http://momalibrary.tumblr.com)