Arthur “Art” Green, a key Chicago Imagist painter and original member of the Hairy Who, died at age 83 in April. The news was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represented him. Green rose to prominence in the mid-1960s alongside five fellow School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduates, exhibiting together as the Hairy Who from 1966 to 1969. Their work offered a humorous, hallucinatory take on American culture, blending Surrealism, Art Brut, and advertising conventions. Green developed a rich personal iconography featuring ice cream cones, wood grain, flames, and fingernails, and taught for decades, influencing a generation of artists.
Green’s death marks the loss of a foundational figure in the Chicago Imagist movement, which stood as a distinct, irreverent alternative to New York Pop Art. The Hairy Who’s brief but influential run helped establish Chicago as a vital art center, and Green’s playful, paradoxical paintings continue to resonate. His legacy endures through his work and his teaching, underscoring the movement’s lasting impact on American art history.