Film: Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists
A lavishly illustrated romp through the art of the Chicago Imagists, 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 inspire artists from Jeff Koons to Chris Ware, making the Imagists the most famous artists you never knew.
This Austin premiere features a Q&A with artist Sarah Canright and film producer Brian Ashby. (109 min.)
Gallery
Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists Trailer
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.
Pentimenti Productions presents a Leslie Buchbinder film.