Art Green

Shortly after graduating from the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), where he studied industrial design, painting, and drawing, Art Green participated in several of the group exhibitions, titled The Hairy Who, staged in the late 1960s at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. The artists who exhibited in these and other group shows were later collectively labeled Chicago Imagists. Encouraged to do so by their instructors at SAIC, the Imagists went to see “outsider art,” inspiring works of art—usually by artists who were not formally trained—that were personal, unrestrained, and in stark contrast to works associated with the mainstream art movements, such as Pop Art, coming out of New York. Green’s mysterious imagery reflects the influence of artists whose work he saw in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (1898—1967).