To accompany their exhibition, The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue, Frac Lorraine will screen our award-winning, critically-acclaimed film, Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists. While Hairy Who has screened in London, Vienna, and other cities around the globe, this screening marks its premiere in France. Frac Lorraine, in collaboration with Triangle - Astérides, Marseille and the Fondation Antoine de Galbert, undertook the translation, which will be made available to other institutions interested in screening the film with French subtitles. For more information about the Christina Ramberg exhibition and the screening, please visit the Frac Lorraine website.

In the mid 1960s, the city of Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of young artists. Collectively known as the Imagists, they showed in successive waves of exhibitions with monikers that might have been psychedelic rock bands of the era—Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style. Kissing cousins to the contemporaneous international phenomenon of Pop Art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face tack. Variously pugnacious, puerile, scatological, graphic, comical, and absurd, it celebrated a very different version of ‘popular’ from the detached cool of New York, London and Los Angeles. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell their wild, woolly, utterly irreverent story.

Ed Paschke Art Center proudly partners with Media Burn Archive and Pentimenti Productions to present:

“Here Is a Man Who Stood Up”: An Afternoon With Ed Paschke

A Chicago Lost and Found event hosted by Paul Durica, with Jamie Ceaser, Jason Nargis, and Tom Palazzolo in person!

Sunday, March 8th, 2020

3:00-5:00pm

Ed Paschke Art Center

5415 W Higgins Ave, Chicago, IL 60630

PLEASE NOTE: This event is currently sold out.

Free, but spaces are limited and RSVP is required.

To attend, contact the Ed Paschke Art Center: info@edpaschkeartcenter.org

“Here Is a Man Who Stood Up” is an immersive experience that uses archival objects, never-before-seen footage, and one-time-only re-stagings to animate the life and work of lifelong Chicago artist Ed Paschke. 

Paschke (1939-2004) was known for his dark version of Pop Art, which featured American icons painted in nightmarish, lurid neon colors. “Here is a man who would not take it any more… Here is a man who stood up” from 1976’s Taxi Driver  served as Paschke’s answering machine message.That movie’s disturbed and lonely protagonist, Travis Bickle, resembled the elements of society that fascinated Paschke throughout his life and found expression in his art. 

“Here is a Man Who Stood Up” at the Ed Paschke Art Center is hosted by Paul Durica, Director of Exhibitions at the Newberry Library, and features rare archival items and ephemera presented by Northwestern University’s Jason Nargis; screenings of Tommy “Chicago” Palazzolo’s short film The Tattooed Lady of Riverview and Chicago-based producer Jamie Ceaser’s documentary Ed Paschke: The Artist Behind the Mask; and a “virtual” true crime tour inspired by Paschke and led by Durica.

Anchoring the event and framing these activities is newly discovered and restored footage of Paschke produced by Ceaser. The footage follows Paschke around Chicago as he narrates the seamy history that has taken place on ordinary streets and offers a chance to engage with the man himself and his cultural preoccupations.

“Here is a Man Who Stood Up” is part of Media Burn Archive’s Chicago Lost & Found series. Media Burn is a nonprofit in Chicago that collects, restores and distributes documentary video created by artists, activists and community groups. Its mission is to use archival media to deepen context and encourage critical thought through a social justice lens. 

Partnering with Media Burn on the event is Pentimenti, a film production company and nonprofit arts organization in the city of Chicago with a mission to produce and distribute high-quality educational documentaries on the visual arts.The inaugural project of Pentimenti Productions is the documentary Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, the first feature film presentation of the work and history of the group of artists who have come to be known as the Chicago Imagists.

The mission of the Ed Paschke Art Center is to preserve and provide public access to the work of legendary Ed Paschke; to serve as an educational resource for youth, adults, artists and academics; and to function as an accessible platform for artists to showcase their work.

Chicago Lost & Found is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

We're pleased to partner with the Ed Paschke Art Center to present another screening of 4 Films by Suzanne Simpson, a collection of long-lost documentaries digitally restored and re-released by Pentimenti. Each of the four short films by Simpson profiles an artist who spent formative time in California during the 1970s, including Mark di Suvero, Roy De Forest, Hassel Smith and local legend Karl Wirsum, who was briefly a visiting instructor at the California State University, Sacramento. Virtually unseen for more than four decades, Simpson's whimsical quartet of archival films captures these artists flourishing amidst the 1970s Bay Area art scene, when Funk art was thriving. View the trailer for 4 Films by Suzanne Simpson here!

The screening will be followed by a talk-back with Harrison Sherrod, executive director of Pentimenti Productions. Running time: 60 minutes

Pentimenti is pleased to partner with Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London to present a screening of Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists as part of the institution’s programming for their current show, How Chicago! Imagists 1960s & 70s. The screening will take place on April 4th at 7pm — more information and tickets can be found here.

How Chicago! marks the first significant exhibition in the UK in almost 40 years of work by the Chicago Imagists. Igniting the Chicago art scene in the 1960s, the artists associated with ‘Chicago Imagism’ worked across painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, creating distinctive works that were irreverent and often visceral. Variously featuring vibrant colors, distorted figuration, shimmering repetitions, puns and wordplay, the Imagists channeled a collision of art history, folk art, the urban fabric of Chicago, as well as vernacular material cultures such as comic books, pinball machines and advertising.

The show is organized by Hayward Gallery Touring in collaboration with Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and De La Warr Pavilion. It is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art as part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy.

Pentimenti is equally thrilled to announce the premiere of It Was Here Before, And It's Here After: The Murals of Hyde Park, a short documentary made by our Advanced Documentary Video students from the Hyde Park Art Center. The film explores the history of murals in Hyde Park and features interviews with muralists Carol Yasko and Carolyn Elaine, arts journalist Jeff Huebner, and the people of Hyde Park. This event will feature a screening of the film, followed by exclusive interview footage of Yasko, Elaine, and Huebner talking about their work. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and brief reception. Free and open to the public!

Pentimenti is pleased to partner with Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art to present the Chicago premiere of the digitally restored re-release of 4 Films by Suzanne Simpson, a collection of long-lost documentaries. Each of the four short films by Simpson, a self-taught director, profiles an artist who spent formative time in California during the 1970s, including Mark di Suvero, Roy De Forest, Hassel Smith and local legend Karl Wirsum, who was briefly a visiting instructor at the California State University, Sacramento. Virtually unseen for more than four decades, Simpson's whimsical quartet of archival films captures these artists flourishing amidst the 1970s Bay Area art scene, when Funk art was thriving.

The screening will be followed by a talk-back with Harrison Sherrod, executive director of Pentimenti Productions.

Running time: 60 minutes

RSVP here

Facebook event

When: December 6th, 6pm
Where: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Pillsbury Auditorium

The critically acclaimed documentary Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, which provides a lively introduction to Chicago’s vibrant art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the debates around regionalism and marginalization, comes to the Minneapolis Institute of Art next week! The film features several artists included in MIA’s “Art from Chicago” exhibition. A discussion will follow with composer Tomeka Reid, animator Lilli Carré, and director Leslie Buchbinder.

This program is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art as part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with presenting partner The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

$10, $5 My Mia members, free to members of the Paintings Affinity Group. Register online or call 612.870.6323.

Please note: this event is now sold out, but more tickets may become available through the AIC website — check here.

We're thrilled to announce that Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists will screen at the Art Institute of Chicago on Friday, November 30th at 3pm in Price Auditorium in conjunction with the museum's exhibition Hairy Who? 1966–1969. Our film is the ideal companion piece to the current show, and the perfect primer to understanding the Imagists in all their glory. From Jim Nutt’s cigar-chomping, amputated women to Christina Ramberg’s studies of corsetry and bondage; from Barbara Rossi’s bejeweled dot paintings to Roger Brown’s secretive, silhouetted figures in windows—Chicago’s diverse artists followed no trend, preferring a path they ferociously cleared for themselves. Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell their wild, woolly, utterly irreverent story. Over forty interviews with the artists and a prominent group of critics, curators, collectors, and contemporary artists are featured, intertwined with a wealth of re-discovered archival footage and photographs. Chicagoist called it, "Electric, lovely film-making…Must be seen by all Chicagoans and art lovers, as well as anyone who wants to feel superbly inspired."

Join us on Thursday, September 27, at 6:00 PM, for a screening of the documentary Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists (2014, US, 105 min., HD), directed by Leslie Buchbinder. The screening is held in conjunction with our exhibition 3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980.

In the mid 1960s, the city of Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of young artists. Collectively known as the Imagists, they showed in successive waves of exhibitions with monikers that might have been psychedelic rock bands of the era—Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style. Kissing cousins to the contemporaneous international phenomenon of Pop Art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face tack. Variously pugnacious, puerile, scatological, graphic, comical, and absurd, it celebrated a very different version of ‘popular’ from the detached cool of New York, London and Los Angeles. Hairy Who and The Chicago Imagists is the first film to tell their wild, woolly, utterly irreverent story.

This screening is free and open to the public.

The 3-D Doings exhibition and subsequent catalogue are funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, as part of Art Design Chicago.

Art Design Chicago is a wide-ranging initiative to explore the breadth of Chicago’s role as a catalyst and incubator for innovations in art and design. Spearheaded and funded by the Terra Foundation, with significant support from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Art Design Chicago was developed in partnership with more than 40 cultural organizations to celebrate Chicago’s artists, designers, and creative producers. Art Design Chicago will feature more than 25 exhibitions and hundreds of public programs, presented throughout 2018, as well as the creation of several scholarly publications and a four-part documentary.

The second installment of Pentimenti Productions ongoing partnership with Media Burn Independent Video Archive, Public Art, Past & Present is a special screening of short documentaries about public art, hosted at the Logan Square multi-disciplinary space, Comfort Station. The Monumental Art of Marc Chagall (1974) follows the titular French artist as he creates the Four Seasons Mosaic. Director Chuck Olin uses the style of direct cinema along with interviews, to show Chagall's artistic process, and the evolution of his piece from model to its final unveiling in Chicago. Produced for the Chicago Council on Fine Arts, Chicago's Miró (1981) provides an overview of the surrealist's life and work, while chronicling the creation of the famous statue, Joan Miró Chicago. These two films, both courtesy of the Media Burn Archive, will be followed by three short pieces by acclaimed local artist Maria Gaspar made for her 96 Acres project, including: Not Just Another Day (2015), PARK (2016), and Stories from the Inside/Outside (2015). The juxtaposition of these two bodies of work will create a fruitful post-screening discussion between Maria Gaspar and Pentimenti sterographer and Media Burn board member Ben Kolak about the evolving role of public art in Chicago, questions about its intended audience, issues of place & access, and more.

Founded in 2012 and led by artist, Maria Gaspar, 96 Acres Project is a series of community-engaged, site-responsive art projects that involve community stakeholders’ ideas about social and restorative justice issues, and that examine the impact of incarceration at the Cook County Jail on Chicago’s West Side. 96 Acres uses multi-disciplinary practices to explore the social and political implications of incarceration on communities of color. Through creative processes and coalition building, 96 Acres aims to generate alternative narratives reflecting on power and responsibility by presenting insightful and informed collective responses for the transformation of a space that occupies 96 acres, but has a much larger reaching outcome.

Media Burn Archive collects, restores and distributes documentary video and television created by artists, activists and community groups, with a mission to preserve audiovisual records of history and culture and to engage audiences with their creative reuse. Media Burn is a project of the Fund for Innovative TV, which has been producing challenging documentary video and television since 1990.

An unprecedented "premiere" of the unfinished documentary CHICAGO CROSSINGS: BRIDGES AND BOUNDARIES (1994, Kartemquin Films)! *FREE* and open to the public!

Presented by Pentimenti Productions, Media Burn Independent Video Archive and Kartemquin Films, in collaboration with the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership and the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
CHICAGO CROSSINGS: BRIDGES AND BOUNDARIES (1994, Kartemquin Films) was originally created to accompany an art exhibition addressing the relationships of African Americans and American Jews at The Spertus Institute. The film follows twelve artists, six Black and six Jewish, as they prepare their work for the show.

The artists included Othello Anderson (co-curator), Claire Wolf Krantz (co-curator), Edith Altman, Joel Feldman, Marva Jolly, Kerry James Marshall, Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Esther Parada, John Rozelle, Hamza Walker (under the pseudonym Sonny Venice), Fan Warren, and John Pitman Weber.

The program will include a screening of the original rough cut of the film, as well as never-before-seen camera original footage of the featured artists. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Gordon Quinn, producer of the film, and acclaimed artists Othello Anderson and Gerda Meyer Bernstein, who participated in the film.

The compulsion to collect was a passion shared by many of the Chicago Imagists, who regularly drew inspiration from found objects, ranging from comic books to folk art figurines. These artists, who were famous for criss-crossing the wires of high art and popular culture, offer an opportune gateway for thinking about the practice of collecting vis-à-vis art making.

In Suzanne Simpson’s long-lost gem Karl Wirsum, recently digitally restored by Pentimenti Productions, the titular artist muses on the influence of mass-produced toys and the work of self-taught artists while fashioning marionettes that blur the line between fine art objects and ludic playthings. The Individuality of the Inanimate Object, directed by Seton Coggeshall, examines the prolific collection of artist, teacher, and Maxwell St. Market enthusiast Ray Yoshida, which included dolls, African masks, garments handmade by Japanese farmers, and more.

Tom Palazzolo’s At Maxwell Street offers a window onto Chicago’s historic bustling flea market, home to a treasure trove of miscellaneous trinkets and ephemera that served as a creative catalyst for many of the Imagists. Tom Palazzolo will be joined in conversation by Lisa Stone, Curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Brown, a student of Yoshida’s, amassed a diverse collection featuring artwork by fellow Imagists, vinyl LPs, and religious icons, that has been faithfully kept intact for visitors to explore in the form of a home museum and gallery. Panel moderated by Pentimenti Executive Director, Harrison Sherrod.

This October, Pentimenti Productions is pleased to collaborate with the Ed Paschke Art Center on FREAK SHOW!, a program celebrating the influence of the carnival and freak show aesthetic on the work of the artists affiliated with the Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists, with a spotlight on Ed Paschke, whose paintings often feature lurid, carnivalesque figures adorned in costumes and masks. A similar emphasis on the outré and grotesque is also notable in the work of fellow artists Jim Nutt and Robert Lostutter, among others.

The event will feature a screening of Tod Browning’s iconoclastic 1932 Pre-code masterpiece, Freaks, which by all accounts left a major impression on Paschke. The film, which casted real sideshow performers, elicited outrage and controversy upon its release, though it later received a cult following and was chosen for preservation in the US National Film Registry.

Freaks will be proceeded by Tom Palazzolo’s short film, The Tattooed Lady of Riverview, a hallucinatory portrait of Jean Furella, an inked folk hero of Chicago’s fabled Riverview Amusement Park. Palazzolo, who was a friend and contemporary of the Imagists, will be joined in a post-screening conversation by Jason Nargis, a Paschke scholar. Please note: some imagery might not be appropriate for children. Free admission.