Secret Origins

Drawing freely from American popular and vernacular imagery, Secret Origins contains curvy feminine silhouettes representing 20th century clichés of bare-shouldered beauties including Hollywood starlets, pin-up girls, and Wonder Woman. (Compare to Smart Museum 2006.86.6, 2006.88.) Suellen Rocca found most of the sources for her imagery in the newspaper “funnies,” the grocery store circulars, and the Sears catalogs that appeared regularly in her mailbox. The Egyptian hieroglyphic stelae in the collections of Chicago’s Field Museum a mainstay of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s curriculum where she studied in the 1960s, also inspired her picture-writing.
Rocca’s work was of great consequence for the stylistic developments of the Chicago Imagist artists emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including her co-participants in Marriage Chicago Style and the Hairy Who exhibitions, all at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago’s South Side. Barbara Rossi, for instance, has spoken of the stimulus of Rocca’s ideas. Jim Nutt also shared Rocca’s pictographic concerns. She studied intaglio printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Vera Berdich (1915‒2003). The Smart Museum has a Surrealist-inspired etching, to which Berdich and Rocca’s Hairy Who colleague Art Green also contributed. (See 2001.575.)