Art Green (artist)
Arthur Green (born 1941) is a well respected professor and painter. Green was a member of the notorious Chicago artistic group, The Hairy Who in the 1960s, a member of the University of Waterloo’s faculty for over 30 years and has been an influential painter for over 40 years.
Early life
Green grew up in Indiana. His father was a civil engineer who designed bridges. His mother crafted quilts and grew flowers.
He started off at the Art Institute of Chicago studying industrial design, but switched to painting and drawing. In 1965, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Career
In 1966, Green formed part of a Chicago-based, six person group that would exhibit their works together under the name 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.
His day job between 1966 and 1967 was employment with Chicago Public Schools. He taught 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 be Chair of the Fine Arts Department. There he taught studio and art history courses.
In 1969, Green married Natalie (also a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago) and moved to Canada to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University as an Assistant Professor.
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 again. This time 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.
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. Green is married with two children, Catherine and Nicholas. As of 2006, Green lived with his wife in Stratford, Ontario.
Paintings
Green is known for his layered paintings. The inspiration for his work has come from his environment. For example, his father’s civil engineering drawings, Chicago architecture (by Louis Sullivan and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), Chicago blues music, University of Waterloo geometry.
In all of his works, Green has tried to avoid using too much of the color green. He has stated it is to "avoid the inevitable puns."
In the introduction to Heavy Weather, Green writes in the early days, “I aspired to make paintings that were awkward and monstrous, boring and familiar.”
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.”
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.”
Noteworthy pieces
- Absolute Purity, 1967, Tastee-Freeze series
- Immoderate Abstention, 1969, Fire and scissors
- Saturated Fat, 1971, Tastee-Freeze series
- Blank Slate, 1978, oil on canvas. First painting of an extended series that involve images of mirrors.
- Risky Business, 1980, a fire-and-fingernail totem with a layered and shaped canvases
- Persons Unknown, 1985, layered and shaped canvases
- Double Crosser, 1991, imagery is secured, wired, lashed, tied-off, taped, and fastened with screws
- Circular Argument, 1994, layered and shaped canvases
Collections
Green’s paintings are in many public and private collections including those of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; The National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institution), Washington, DC; The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Northwestern University, Chicago, IL; Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, NS; The Province of British Columbia; The Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, ON; The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and The University of Waterloo Art Gallery.
Exhibitions
The artist’s work has been the subject of over 140 exhibitions at such venues as The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Green's works were featured in Border Crossings magazine, issue #96 Strange Beauty.
Honours
- 1991, awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award at the University of Waterloo
- 1999, elected to Membership of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
- 2004, awarded the Waterloo Regional Arts Council Arts Award for Visual Art
References
- University of Waterloo Press Release- April 2004. Retrieved on November 28, 2006.
- Border Crossings Back Issues. Retrieved on November 28, 2006.
- National mag features Stratford. Retrieved on June 29, 2007.
- Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery- CV. Retrieved on October 1, 2007.