A Hairy Who’s History of the Hairy Who

A 40-page oral history of the Hairy Who featuring Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. I couldn’t find Jim Falconer at the time. Published in The Ganzfeld #3, 2003. PDF to come in the far-flung future.

From the intro:

The bare facts are these: “Hairy Who” was originally the name of a 1966 group exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. When that group, all graduates of the Art Institute of Chicago, mounted more shows, they kept the name…. The Hairy Who consisted of just six artists: Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nelson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. There were other quirkily named group shows at the Hyde Park Art Center and elsewhere, some with various members of the Hairy Who and other Chicago artists of similar bents (Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg, for example), but the Hairy Who was limited to just…five shows and six participating artists. As installations, the shows were artworks unto themselves, and were accompanied by inexpensive comic book format publications for which the group did their own color separations and either produced new work or adapted preexisting images. The group dissolved when the members began to move away from the city; first Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson to California in 1968 and then Art Green to Canada in 1969. All of the members remain active in the arts.