Arthur “Art” Green, an original member of the art group Hairy Who?, died at the age of 83 on Monday, April 14. Green, who burst into the Chicago art scene in the mid-to-late 1960s, leaves behind not only a wealth of artwork capturing his ability to complicate the mundane, but also an almost 40-year secondary education career as a fine arts professor — primarily at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. The news of his death was confirmed by Garth Greenan gallery in New York, which has represented the artist since 2012.
Green was born in 1941 in Frankfort, Indiana, one of three boys to a father who was a civil engineer working for the Nickel Plate Road and a mother who had a knack for patchwork quilting. As a child, Green said he enjoyed drawing but was never immersed in visual arts, only visiting his first art museum in high school. He initially wanted to pursue microbiology, as he stated in an oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, but became interested in graphic design thanks to a new art teacher who joined the faculty as well as his father’s at-home print shop, which had a letterpress machine.
Prior to attending college, Green worked at a public library as a bookmobile driver and staff artist. Considering graphic or industrial design as options, he applied and was accepted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1961. At the school, Green found himself being forced to think outside the box under the instruction of Ray Yoshida and became acquainted with fellow artists Jim Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, and Suellen Rocca. The six formed a tight friend group that exhibited together under the name the Hairy Who?, mentored by Yoshida and SAIC Professor Whitney Halstead. Green and the other members are often associated with the Chicago Imagists who emerged around the same time, though the Hairy Who? was its own distinct group.
The first Hairy Who? exhibition took place at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1966, curated by Exhibitions Director Don Baum. Though each artist maintained their own individualized practice, the artwork they displayed as a group had a bold, graphic and cartoonish quality, blended from both commercial aesthetics and youth responses to conflict at the time of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the rise of counterculture. The art was provocative and humorous, using puns, wordplay, psychedelic patterning, and comics to prod at larger themes of sexuality, consumerism, and more — clearly indifferent to the high-art happenings in New York at the time.
Despite working primarily in oil, Green’s own work also embodied the flattened, comic quality at the time, and he soon infused it with more prominent threads of Surrealism and vibrant abstraction after Hairy Who? disbanded in 1969. Green began explorations with linear perspective and depth, form and dimensionality, and patterning.
In his work, Green repeatedly revisited universal motifs — ice cream cones, Necker cubes, patterned quilts, tires, scissors, wood grain, painted fingernails, twisting and intertwined cables, and so on — rendering them fastidiously with hyper-saturated or arbitrary colors. Through his use of gradients, isometric perspective, and black outlines, Green’s confounding compositions are simultaneously layered and flat, pushing his practice toward op art with his noted flair for trompe l’oeil tricks of the eye.
He soon married SAIC textile design graduate Natalie Novotny, and the pair emigrated to Canada after he accepted a position as an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. In 1977, Green and Novotny would permanently move to Stratford, Ontario, where they would both join the Fine Arts department at the University of Waterloo. Between ’77 and 2006, Green served twice as the department’s chair and received a distinguished Teacher Award in 1990.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, which hosted his first retrospective in 2005; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna; and many others. Throughout his career, Green was the subject of 29 solo exhibitions — nine of which were put on by Phyllis Kind gallery in Chicago, and the last of which was at Garth Greenan gallery in 2023.
Green is survived by his brother Don, his children Catherine and Nicholas and their spouses, granddaughters Sophie, Feodora, and Fionnuala, and countless nieces and nephews.
