Hairy Who? 1966-1969 : Art Institute, Chicago, IL

Neither a movement nor a style, Hairy Who was simply the name six Chicago artists chose when they decided to join forces and exhibit together in the mid-1960s.

As the Hairy Who, Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—all recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—began mounting unconventional displays of bright, bold graphic work at the Hyde Park Art Center on the city’s South Side. Over a period of four years, they transformed the art landscape of Chicago, injecting their new and unique voices into the city’s rising national and international profile. This exhibition is the first-ever major survey dedicated solely to the groundbreaking exhibition group and occupies both the museum’s prints and drawings galleries (124–27) as well as some American art galleries (271–73).

Like all Americans of their generation, the young Chicagoans of the Hairy Who came of age during a period of national upheaval that witnessed the escalation of the war in Vietnam, assassinations of political figures, student protests, a rising counterculture, tumultuous racial and gender relations, and the expansion of a capitalist consumer economy.