Art Green

Arthur Green (May 13, 1941 – April 14, 2025) was an American painter who was one of the original Hairy Who members from Chicago, a group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited together in the 1960s and 1970s and made representational art with a slight surrealist touch. He was also a member of the University of Waterloo's faculty for over 30 years. His style of his paintings mixes pop-art motifs with surrealist tendencies. His upbringing in Chicago and its vicinity may have influenced him, from the accessibility of the Art Institute of Chicago to the architecture of Louis Sullivan, but he also may have been influenced by advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s that had undertones of sexuality.

Biography Green was born in Frankfort, Indiana. His father was a civil engineer who designed bridges; his mother crafted quilts and grew flowers. Green initially set out to be a car designer, though he switched gears to graphic design when he started at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The strange name reflected the trend in monikers for rock groups of the time. The other members of the group were James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. The book contains photographs of the 50 pieces, commentary, and resource images which had inspired Green.

In 2006, the University of Waterloo gave him emeritus status.

Green died April 14, 2025, at the age of 83.

Artistic style Green's style falls somewhere between surrealism and pop art, with hints of op art. He sought to capture the straightforwardness and mystery evoked in these surrealist's paintings. He also enjoyed the work of James Rosenquist, whose work was more about surface than substance; however, Green's objects appear to have a psychological rather than just a visual presence. Imagery includes ice cream cones, bridges, incomplete bridges, mirrors, scissors, women's painted fingernails, passionate couples, tires, moons floating over water, puzzle pieces, silhouettes of a plane flying overhead, searchlights, tornados, women's nylon-covered legs, wood grain, leather cords, screws, cables, knots, zippers, tapes, stitches, Necker cubes, and other optical illusions. Though the illusory depth of his paintings is not all that deep, the viewer still finds himself looking at, into, and through his paintings.

Green's artwork is full of dichotomies. He had a keen interest in examining our relationship to reality, or, more specifically, the difference between looking and seeing and the rewards of the latter. He combined order and chaos, but every force is balanced and contained. This order calms the chaos in time; the viewer is rewarded for spending time with his canvases as hidden objects reveal themselves in an endless tension between rationalism and irrationalism. Though their primary interest in exhibiting together stemmed from the fact that they were all friends and colleagues, there are stylistic similarities in their artwork. All of these artists' work have tendencies towards a cartoon style or pop art; there is a high degree of visual resolution in their drawings and paintings and a sense of horror vacui fills their canvases. The canvases, too, appeared to be constructed from individual pieces of polished glass; his paintings became monuments to a secular campy artificiality. Nothing was quite as it seemed in these canvases, where Green was more interested in disrupting the narrative via a manipulation of both form - i.e. he uses shaped canvas - and content - i.e. the scenes within his paintings appear cropped, giving only sensuous and flickering views of a hidden tale.

Noteworthy pieces Absolute Purity, 1967, Tastee-Freeze series Immoderate Abstention, 1969, Fire and scissors Saturated Fat, 1971, Tastee-Freeze series Blank Slate, 1978, oil on canvas. First painting of an extended series that involve images of mirrors. Risky Business, 1980, a fire-and-fingernail totem with a layered and shaped canvases Persons Unknown, 1985, layered and shaped canvases Double Crosser, 1991, imagery is secured, wired, lashed, tied-off, taped, and fastened with screws Circular Argument, 1994, layered and shaped canvases

Collections Green's paintings are in many public collections including: Akron Art Museum, Ohio Art Institute of Chicago Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University, Indiana Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Ontario Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

Honors 1991, awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award at the University of Waterloo 1999, elected to Membership of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts 2004, awarded the Waterloo Regional Arts Council Arts Award for Visual Art 2016, received an honorary doctorate of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago