Wiglet

The anonymous feminine silhouette permeates Suellen Rocca’s paintings, drawings, and prints in the mid-1960s. The etching Wiglet continues the theme, but it illustrates other central motifs: women’s hair and dancing couples. (See Smart Museum 2001.384, 2006.87, and 2001.392.) Her curling, meandering line-work rhymes formally with her polymorphic forms in this print: palm trees, bananas, fingers, engagement rings, hair ringlets, curls, wigs, poodles, and dancing couples share idiosyncratic associations in her personal iconography of femininity drawn from the newspaper “funnies” and advertisements, the grocery store circulars, and the Sears catalogs that appeared regularly in her mailbox. As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s she also studied picture-writing such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in the nearby Field Museum.

Rocca took part in the Hairy Who exhibitions held at the Hyde Park Art Center on the South Side of Chicago (1966‒1968), which featured other Chicago Imagist artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum. These artists loved humorous word play. Rocca’s play on hair is especially obvious in her contributions to the comic books they distributed at their group shows. Her commercially-printed original drawings for the comic books exploit conventions of mass communication in a sly humorous vein.