‘While New York was cool, Chicago was hot’, is the short answer Suellen Rocca regularly gave to the question of the difference between New York’s Pop and Chicago’s Imagism. While Pop Art was deadpan, the work of the Chicago Imagists — or the Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, the Artful Codgers, Chicago Antigua, or Monster Roster, as they were variously known in the two-year stint of collective shows — took pop culture references a step further, and processed them in a personal way, warts and all. They expressed and reflected the grotesque, hysterical and at times psychotic nature of life in 1960s America; in pieces of noisy, psychedelic, social commentary.
Neither a formal group or designation of style, the artists who fell under the title of Chicago Imagists shifted and changed over the years; generally only gathering for collective exhibitions, as friends, and partners in both fictional and legal marriages. They met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and first exhibited together at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Centre in 1966, as The Hairy Who. Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Falconer, Art Green, Karl Wirsum and Suellen Rocca had all been mentored by Whitney Halstead and Ray Yoshida, who encouraged their interest in commercial culture and counter-culture, in vernacular forms, cartoons and tattoos; Renaissance painting, ancient Egyptian painting and indigenous Southern crafts. Their references were broad and involved, and they never shied away from messiness, complexity or holding multiple truths at once. Their work was funny and light, vibrant and vulgar, challenging and transgressive. In a review for a 1982 show at New York’s Pace Gallery, John Russell wrote in The New York Times: “There is about many of these works a relentlessly gabby, arm-twisting, eyeball-contacting quality that comes as a great surprise in a gallery that we associate with the spare statements of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden. Why are they so repulsive? Are they all equally repulsive? Are we wrong not to like them? These are fair questions, and they deserve an answer.” Russell didn’t really get an answer, because as much as the Imagists were denounced for being “regional” and repulsive, they didn’t care about being considered suitable or important — the cold, closed, coastal critics weren’t who the work was for.
In an obituary for Sullen Rocca, who died in March 2020 at 76, Randy Kennedy described how her “hieroglyphic, phantasmagoric work poked a finger in the eye of late-20th-century modernist purities”. She ignored the distance enforced by Pop, Abstract and Conceptual art, instead placing herself, and her own experiences, at the centre of her representations of contemporary society; maintaining a sense of freedom by grounding her work in what she knew and what she could imagine. She painted palm trees, the diamond rings and bra styles in the Sears catalogue, the dancing couples and fancy haircuts featured in ads at the back pages of magazines; hats, handbags, knee-high boots, lamps, “ooh-ahh’s” and “mmm-mmm’s”, hands, hairy legs, and houses blowing smoke into wobbly, naked, fuzzy bodies. Her palate ran from neon to pastel, her compositions often made up of various and overlapping elements; zooming in and out, telling different parts of Suellen Rocca’s story, or the stories that she had been told about herself.
She was interested in the many, and considerable efforts made to promise (and/or sell) happiness to young women in the 1960s and 70s, the Women’s Movement and the shifting boundaries of domestic life; organising her often repeating imagery, symbols, doodles and annotations in abstract patterns and graphic compositions, inspired by hieroglyphs, children’s pre-readers and store catalogues — all forms of sort-of-picture-writing. Handbags feature as both objects and signifiers for holding in things we don’t want to get out, characters appear often as outlines or faceless forms — everything is laid out for the world to see, but as much as Rocca work reveals, it also conceals. In Bare-Shouldered Beauty, Rocca paints icons and small vignettes around a central silhouette of a woman’s figure, painted out in grey. In such a busy, layered and chaotic landscape, it’s hard to comprehend how or if the story progresses. There are dogs, ice creams, suburban and wild landscapes; people dancing, sunbathing, running and floating in the sea — it’s unclear whether they are running towards or away from something, and whether they are swimming or drowning, just like it can be hard to tell whether someone is laughing or crying.
In Palm Finger, Rocca balances intimacy with surrealism; it’s less busy, and in some ways feels immediately more generous because of that, but that initial hit is subverted by the detail of the work. It’s a palm tree balancing on the tip of someone’s finger, surrounded by a repeat pattern of forms, the canvas bound by rope. The palm, an easy symbol of holidays, leisure and exotic locations, is recognisable by its outline, painted in with the colours of a tropical sunset and standing on a cloud. It’s surrounded by what could be extruding sun rays, dropping from the aforementioned sunset, onto orange amoebae-like things and a repeat pattern of a high-heeled leg standing on something that from its form, could either be hard or soft. The finger is swollen, pink and veined, and most likely isn’t a finger at all.
Rocca’s pictorial vocabulary shifted and changed throughout her life, but it was consistently dismissive of anything austere or detached. The mood of her work reflected her own and that of the time, and had the clarity we should expect from someone who is willing to really face themselves, (which is little). It’s decorative and complicated, joyful and weird, light and dark, beautiful and kinda gross. As Jean Genet wrote in The Thief’s Journal, “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”
Neither a formal group or designation of style, the artists who fell under the title of Chicago Imagists shifted and changed over the years; generally only gathering for collective exhibitions, as friends, and partners in both fictional and legal marriages. They met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and first exhibited together at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Centre in 1966, as The Hairy Who. Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Falconer, Art Green, Karl Wirsum and Suellen Rocca had all been mentored by Whitney Halstead and Ray Yoshida, who encouraged their interest in commercial culture and counter-culture, in vernacular forms, cartoons and tattoos; Renaissance painting, ancient Egyptian painting and indigenous Southern crafts. Their references were broad and involved, and they never shied away from messiness, complexity or holding multiple truths at once. Their work was funny and light, vibrant and vulgar, challenging and transgressive. In a review for a 1982 show at New York’s Pace Gallery, John Russell wrote in The New York Times: “There is about many of these works a relentlessly gabby, arm-twisting, eyeball-contacting quality that comes as a great surprise in a gallery that we associate with the spare statements of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden. Why are they so repulsive? Are they all equally repulsive? Are we wrong not to like them? These are fair questions, and they deserve an answer.” Russell didn’t really get an answer, because as much as the Imagists were denounced for being “regional” and repulsive, they didn’t care about being considered suitable or important — the cold, closed, coastal critics weren’t who the work was for.
In an obituary for Sullen Rocca, who died in March 2020 at 76, Randy Kennedy described how her “hieroglyphic, phantasmagoric work poked a finger in the eye of late-20th-century modernist purities”. She ignored the distance enforced by Pop, Abstract and Conceptual art, instead placing herself, and her own experiences, at the centre of her representations of contemporary society; maintaining a sense of freedom by grounding her work in what she knew and what she could imagine. She painted palm trees, the diamond rings and bra styles in the Sears catalogue, the dancing couples and fancy haircuts featured in ads at the back pages of magazines; hats, handbags, knee-high boots, lamps, “ooh-ahh’s” and “mmm-mmm’s”, hands, hairy legs, and houses blowing smoke into wobbly, naked, fuzzy bodies. Her palate ran from neon to pastel, her compositions often made up of various and overlapping elements; zooming in and out, telling different parts of Suellen Rocca’s story, or the stories that she had been told about herself.
She was interested in the many, and considerable efforts made to promise (and/or sell) happiness to young women in the 1960s and 70s, the Women’s Movement and the shifting boundaries of domestic life; organising her often repeating imagery, symbols, doodles and annotations in abstract patterns and graphic compositions, inspired by hieroglyphs, children’s pre-readers and store catalogues — all forms of sort-of-picture-writing. Handbags feature as both objects and signifiers for holding in things we don’t want to get out, characters appear often as outlines or faceless forms — everything is laid out for the world to see, but as much as Rocca work reveals, it also conceals. In Bare-Shouldered Beauty, Rocca paints icons and small vignettes around a central silhouette of a woman’s figure, painted out in grey. In such a busy, layered and chaotic landscape, it’s hard to comprehend how or if the story progresses. There are dogs, ice creams, suburban and wild landscapes; people dancing, sunbathing, running and floating in the sea — it’s unclear whether they are running towards or away from something, and whether they are swimming or drowning, just like it can be hard to tell whether someone is laughing or crying.
In Palm Finger, Rocca balances intimacy with surrealism; it’s less busy, and in some ways feels immediately more generous because of that, but that initial hit is subverted by the detail of the work. It’s a palm tree balancing on the tip of someone’s finger, surrounded by a repeat pattern of forms, the canvas bound by rope. The palm, an easy symbol of holidays, leisure and exotic locations, is recognisable by its outline, painted in with the colours of a tropical sunset and standing on a cloud. It’s surrounded by what could be extruding sun rays, dropping from the aforementioned sunset, onto orange amoebae-like things and a repeat pattern of a high-heeled leg standing on something that from its form, could either be hard or soft. The finger is swollen, pink and veined, and most likely isn’t a finger at all.
Rocca’s pictorial vocabulary shifted and changed throughout her life, but it was consistently dismissive of anything austere or detached. The mood of her work reflected her own and that of the time, and had the clarity we should expect from someone who is willing to really face themselves, (which is little). It’s decorative and complicated, joyful and weird, light and dark, beautiful and kinda gross. As Jean Genet wrote in The Thief’s Journal, “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”