Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists

In the mid 1960s, Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of artists collectively known as the Imagists. A cousin to the contemporaneous phenomenon of Pop art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face approach. The Imagist artists--including Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg and Karl Wirsum--each had his or her own unmistakable style: scatological, meticulous, comical and absurd. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell the Imagists' whole story, from their notoriety in the 1960s to their 21st-century resurgence in popularity. Almost 50 years after their first show, the Imagists have influenced generations of artists, from Jeff Koons to Chris Ware. With a wealth of archival footage and photographs, the film also includes over 40 interviews with critics, curators, collectors, artists and the Imagists themselves.