Art Green (artist)

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. However, during his first year he had trouble finding enough graphic design classes to take, so he switched his focus once again to painting. In 1965, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Green first came to prominence in 1966, when he joined five other recent Art Institute graduates for the first of a series of group exhibitions called The Hairy Who at a series of shows at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center. 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. Their work was known for its coarseness and vulgarity. It stood in contrast to the sleek and urban work by Manhattan artists at the time, namely Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist.

Between 1966 and 1967 Green worked at various Chicago public schools teaching seventh grade art. Between 1967 and 1968 he worked at Chicago City College as an Instructor. Green taught basic design, interior design, and art history. The following year he moved to Kendall College of Art and Design, Evanston, Illinois to assume a position as the Chair of the Fine Arts Department. There he taught studio and art history courses. In 1969, Green married Natalie Novotny (also a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago), whose Art Institute education in pattern and fabric design became a strong influence on his work. He also accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University as an Assistant Professor.

Finally, in 1975, he received a Canada Council bursary, which enabled him to teach painting and drawing at the University of British Columbia. In 1976, he moved to Stratford, Ontario to teach at the University of Waterloo. While at UW, he served two terms as Chair of the Fine Arts Department; 1988–1991 and 2000-2002. He has been living in Canada ever since with two children, Catherine and Nicholas.

In 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery hosted Heavy Weather: Art Green Retrospective in collaboration with the University of Waterloo Art Gallery. This exhibition brought together 50 of Green’s pieces, loaned from the artist and several private and public collectors in the United States and Canada, as a comprehensive survey of his 40-year career. Gary Michael Dault created a soft cover book with the same Heavy Weather title. 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.

Artistic Style

Art Green's style falls somewhere between surrealism and pop art, with hints of op art. Two of his major influences, both in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, are Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. He sought to capture the straightforwardness and mystery evoked in these surrealist's paintings. Sometimes, he even directly quoted them, using curtains and multi point perspectives to describe architectural elements. 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.

The imagery Green has used throughout his entire career, and continues to use to this day, is drawn from illustrated textbooks and advertising of the forties and fifties that touch on technological and roadside Americana, with overt themes of sexual symbolism. 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. The paintings tend to have torn or stitched imagery that evokes the trompe l'oeil tradition; transparent and solid planes overlap, too, achieving a high level of spatial complexity. 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 has 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 combines 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.

1960s

Art Green's initial forays into art making closely resembled the Abstract Expressionist tradition, like most artists born around his time. However, he eventually stumbled upon a book on Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical period and quickly changed his style. He suddenly became interested in the absurdity of every day life and betwixt by a dream world created in modern day advertising. His turn towards surrealism at this juncture made absolute sense.

Art Green was one of the original six members of the Hairy Who. This was a group of artists who studied together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later exhibited together six times in the 1960s. Their first show was at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 1966; subsequently, they exhibited twice more at the Hyde Park Art Center, once at the San Francisco Art Institute, once at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., and once at the Visual Arts Gallery in New York. 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.

1970s

By the 1970s, Green had become increasingly interested in trompe l'oeil effects on his canvas. His paintings increasingly made use of a tape motif, which gave surface texture a pictorial representation; it's almost as if there is a picture within a picture in these paintings. An erotic nostalgia pervades his mixed up and overlapping still lifes, as he combines fragments of contemporary life into highly stylized and symmetric patterns. His paintings take on a prism-like appearance as he reinterpreted familiar images. Increasingly so, he turns away from the figure and focuses only on cropped views of fingernails and hands.

1980s

In the mid-1980s, Green was interested in the Necker Cube. He wrote, “I was intrigued by the possibilities of simultaneously representing all sides of a rotating cube. I incorporated tiling patterns of unfolded cubes along with the hypercube in my work.” His interest in illusion extended off of the canvas and actually began affecting the shape of the canvas itself by the 1980s. 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.

1990s & 2000s

Of his more recent work, Green wrote, “I have been trying to make layered paintings that take a long time to “see”. I want to encourage the viewer to be conscious of the (usually unconscious) process of the interpretation and construction of images in the mind.” He has continued making use of shaped canvas and a visual complexity of his handling of paint that closely resembles a kaleidoscope. To this day, he continues to use the same motifs of a flickering flame, wood paneling, ice cream cone, woman's fingernail, etc.

Noteworthy pieces

Collections

Green’s paintings are in many public and private collections including:

Exhibitions

Since 1968, Green’s work has been the subject of over 25 solo exhibitions, including nine at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1974, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1986, Chicago and New York), three at Bau-Xi Gallery (1974, 1979, and 1983, Vancouver and Toronto), and one at Corbett vs. Dempsey (2011, Chicago). His work has also been featured in more than 120 group exhibitions, including Personal Torment–Human Response (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago (1981, Camden Art Center, London); 12 Chicago Artists (National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin). In 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario mounted Heavy Weather, the artist’s first career retrospective. In early 2009, the CUE Art Foundation, New York hosted a solo exhibition of Green’s work, curated by Jim Nutt.

Solo Exhibitions

1968

1973

1974

1976

1976-1977

1978

1979

1980

1981-1982

1983

1986

1991

1992

1999

2005

2008

2009

2010

2011-2012

2013

2017

Group Exhibitions

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1969-1970

1970

1971–1972

1972

1972–1973

1973

1973-1974

1974

1975

1976

1977

1977-1978

1978

1978–1979

1979

1980

1980-1982

1982

1982–1983

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1992

1993

1994

1994-1995

1995

1995–1996

1996

1999–2000

2000

2002

2003

2003–2004

2004

2006

2007

2007-2008

2008

2010-2011

2011

2011-2012

2012

2012–2013

2013

2014

2014–2015

2015–2016

2016

2017

Honours