"Nuth'n to Hyde" Gertrude Abercrombie and the Hyde Park Ethos, 1935–1975

Press Release

Although its placement in the annals of art history has been linked to exhibitions there in the latter half of the 1960s, the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park had been an enclave for artistic activity starting decades earlier. This focused group show gently decenters the Hyde Park mythology, configuring the Imagist shows at the Hyde Park Art Center as a continuation of the neighborhood’s longstanding bohemianism and experimentation. At the center of the exhibition sits painter Gertrude Abercrombie, whose recent “discovery” and meteoric ascent in the contemporary art world, fifty years after her death, has come as a surprise to her many admirers in Chicago. Spotlighting an important canvas first unveiled in 1945 at the Renaissance Society (also located in Hyde Park) and a tiny self-portrait in a thrift store frame, the show presents never-seen portraits of Abercrombie by Karl Priebe and Ceil Rosenberg. The exhibition features work by Eleanor Coen and Max Kahn, whose printmaking activities were based in the south side neighborhood in the 1930s and ’40s, as well as fellow Hyde Parker Miyoko Ito, represented by an early canvas, and a “binocular” painting by Harold Haydon, an artist and critic closely associated with the University of Chicago. One of the most beloved and colorful artists of Hyde Park, Cosmo Campoli is present with his signal 1950s bronze “Birth of Death.” Don Baum, like Campoli, was associated early on with the Monster Roster; as director of the Hyde Park Art Center, Baum went on to help facilitate the Hairy Who, False Image, and Non-Plussed Some Imagist shows, and is included in “Nuth’n to Hyde” with two pieces from the 1960s, one of which is an assemblage portrait of collector and Hyde Park social maven Ruth Horwich. From the Imagist camp, the show presents works by Karl Wirsum (the elaborate flyer from which comes the show’s title, together with its original sketch), a piece by Jim Falconer shown in the third Hairy Who exhibition, replete with its original price tag, and a sensational Jim Nutt painting from the mid 1970s.