The Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966-1969 / 2015 / Première édition / Comme neuf collection

The Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966-1969

*Like New*

Hardcover with illustrated boards and titles printed in white on cover and spine,Orange endpapers. No dust-jacket as issued. 168 pages. Profusely illustrated. This publication presents all of the printed works related to Hairy Who exhibitions. Important documents in the history of contemporary art and artists books. Formatted like comic books, they are among the very first full-color self-published artists books, containing work made especially for publication. Studying these works is important to an understanding of post-1960s art and artists books.

“A need for work to be done and a place in which to do it these are the twin grounds for the existence of the Hairy Who, according to the two friends who first hatched the idea, Jim Nutt and lim Falconer. Hairy Who is the name under which six Chicago-based artists - Falconer, Nutt. Art Green. Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum - exhibited from 1966 to 1969. Those two simple factors allowed for the creation of a body of work that strikes me as an ecstatic response to simply being alive and opening your eyes. It is not ironic, but neither is it solemn. It is warm but not sentimental, immaculately crafted but not cold. It is art that embraces mundane realities, wet sexuality, fantastic realities, and a hard-edged spirituality.
It asks for nothing from the viewer, makes no special cases, and yet it is not against or for anything.
Most of the Hairy Who artists grew up in Chicago, and their backgrounds were similar in tenor. Amid the modernist landmarks, beneath the skyscrapers and the elevated train, the working-class people of 194s and 1950s Chicago were steeped in the grit of industry. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the outdoor Maxwell Street Market was at its height, featuring performers (freakish and musical alike), hustlers, cooks, and collectors. The members of the Hairy Who all attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in the 1950s and 196os, and were taught by instructors with unusually diverse tastes - foremost among them Kathleen Blackshear and Whitney Halstead, who gave equal weight to the Art Institutes fine art collection and the material on exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History. They received an encyclopedic, nonhierarchical education: late medieval Italian and Northern Renaissance painting; nature drawings; Mesoamerican pottery; Senufo tribal masks;
American Indian artifacts; Miro and Dubuffet: pinball machines and comic books and Sears catalogues; Nazca and Oceanic objects; hand-painted signs. Nothing was off the table.”

A7