Morning Awning

Karl Wirsum’s work comes out of his fascination with indigenous art from Mesoamerica and the Southwestern United States, and comic strips and toys, combined with an engagement with the city of Chicago itself—its plethora of urban signage, sounds of rhythm and blues, and eccentric characters. This 1966 drawing is unusual for Wirsum in its lack of bilateral symmetry and jagged linework, but it is characteristic in his use of bold, flat colors in the era of psychedelic record album covers and other commercial art, and his emphasis on two-dimensional design and formal repetition through patterning devices. (See Smart Museum 2001.506-512, 2007.171.)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Wirsum exhibited with other emerging young artists in antic exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, such as Jim Nutt and Art Green in the Hairy Who shows, and Ed Paschke in Marriage Chicago Style (1970) and Chicago Antigua (1971). He shares with them an affinity for outlandish and confrontational figuration and word play. (See 2001.343, 2001.632 and 1978.169-171.) Likewise, his treatment of the figure’s nose is striking in its resemblance to Jim Nutt’s later imaginary portraits in which Nutt obsessively revisits this distinctive facial feature.