Roger Brown / Art Green

This printed invitation/exhibition checklist for a two-man exhibition of works by Art Green and Roger Brown in 1974 illustrates the collaborative ethos among Chicago Imagists associated with various exhibiting groups in the late 1960s—Hairy Who, False Image, The Non-Plussed Some, Marriage Chicago Style, and Chicago Antigua. Within and across each cluster of exhibiting artists, one sees individual styles and different viewpoints, but also shared personal and professional connections through their associations over the years with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Exquisite Corpse was a collaborative visual device they turned to often to represent themselves in groups that they formed solely for the purpose of exhibiting their work, at a time when venues for emerging artists in Chicago were scarce. (See Smart Museum 2001.575, 2001.581, 2001.583-584, 2001.586a, 2006.89a, and 2001.577.) The classic Surrealist example of an Exquisite Corpse from which the game receives its name is the following sentence composed by five players: “The exquisite—corpse—shall drink—the young—wine." Each player secretly invents a piece of a sentence or a drawing, which, upon completion, is revealed to all the players. One can see the way Brown (top) and Green (bottom) dealt with the meeting point between their two individual images.