Wirsum asked, “Harry who? Who is this guy?” They changed “Harry” to “Hairy,” and the name stuck. Karl Wirsum inadvertently gave the group its name when he walked into a meeting where the other members were talking about the art critic Harry Bouras. So, who were the six members of the Hairy Who? Each exhibition came with a comic book–style publication-a dig at stuffy exhibition catalogues-as well as buttons and posters. Rather than a series of group shows, their exhibitions challenged traditional modes of installation with artists covering gallery walls with flowery linoleum and hanging oversized price tags on paintings and drawings. Though the collective exhibited together for just three years, from 1966 to 1969, they drew national and international attention and catalyzed the broader Chicago Imagist movement, which extended into the 1980s. Chicago itself was an epicenter of racial tension throughout the 1960s following desegregation attempts by Dr. The dissonance perfectly captures the tensions between the relentlessly upbeat fantasy world of American consumerism and the political upheaval of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Their works often depict mutilations and skin diseases, which sit in stark contrast with their otherwise cheerful aesthetic. Today, the Hairy Who are renowned for their hallucinatory representations of the body, which shows it fragmented, elongated, and exaggerated. Their sources were as eclectic and far-ranging as Art Brut, Surrealism, sale catalogues, bodybuilders, and medical illustrations. The Hairy Who were united by their education, their sense of humor, their craftsmanship, and their knowledge of art history. If New York Pop art was considered cool, Chicago’s was hot, embodied in the mid-1960s by six recent graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited together under the moniker “the Hairy Who.” While Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein treated mass consumerism and popular culture with irony and distance, the Hairy Who were interested in the emotional charge of such imagery.
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