Barbara Rossi
Barbara Rossi
1940 - 2023
Like so many of her Imagist colleagues, Rossi was profoundly influenced by her teachers at SAIC, especially Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead.1 Both professors impressed upon their students the importance of looking at non-Western art, and of absorbing the lessons of quotidian visual culture. Rossi adopted the habit of always carrying a camera in order to capture meaningful sights that she encountered in the course of daily life, a practice that she maintains today.2
In the classroom, Halstead exposed the young Rossi to new sources of inspiration in art history, including Surrealism, Dada, and American folk art.3 It was also during her time as a graduate student at SAIC that Rossi was first exposed to Indian painting,4 which became a lifelong personal and scholarly interest and led to her curating a traveling exhibition on the subject, as well as authoring From the Ocean of Painting: India’s Popular Paintings 1589 to the Present (1998, Oxford University Press).
Because Rossi had not done her undergraduate studies at SAIC, she did not begin to associate herself with the other Chicago Imagists until 1970, when Don Baum invited her to participate in the Marriage Chicago Style exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center.5 Though Rossi was the newcomer, Baum’s instincts were correct: she was a perfect fit, both artistically and socially, with the rest of the Imagist artists. Their wide-ranging aesthetic interests and fun-loving approach to the exhibition’s installation appealed to Rossi, and were the foundation for the affinity amongst their artwork.6 She returned to HPAC the following year to show in Chicago Antigua, the final installment of the original group of HPAC-based Imagist group shows.
As Rossi became increasingly involved in Chicago’s art world, she spent more time visiting museum exhibitions and commercial galleries, such as Allan Frumkin Gallery, where she saw particularly influential work by Peter Saul and Saul Steinberg.7 Rossi’s work from the late 1960s shows some of the impact of the near-abstract cartoonishness of Saul’s refrigerator paintings from this time. Rossi’s paintings also were primarily abstract washes of flat, glowing color, but sprinkled with staring eyeballs or bulbous noses that subtly came together to form humanoid visages. She also began experimenting with reverse-painted Plexiglas, a medium that was also used by her Imagist colleagues, [most notably] Jim Nutt and Ed Flood.
In the 1970s Rossi became increasingly close with some of the other Imagist artists, including Roger Brown, Philip Hanson, and Christina Ramberg, with whom she traveled in both the United States and Europe, visiting important sites and collections of outsider art.8 In 1971 Rossi took a teaching position at SAIC, which she still holds today. In 1974, she began exhibiting at Phyllis Kind Gallery, where her work was represented until the mid-1990s.
Rossi began experimenting with different media in the years after she finished her MFA. In particular, she was fascinated with printmaking and traditional fabric arts. In 1970, she produced a series of single-color etchings on silky fabric, which she then stitched into quilts. Though this interest in sewing and textiles emanated from her childhood, the Imagist reverence for carefully crafted objects, inspired in part by artists like H.C. Westermann, reinforced Rossi’s natural tendencies towards meticulousness and her interest in the vernacular arts.9 Even when she returned to painting, Rossi continued to treat her works as three-dimensional objects, often incorporating feathers, sequins, hair, and custom-painted frames. Her subject matter during this time remained abstract with vague references to portraiture, as with her earliest paintings, but her style became increasingly precise and clean-lined as she perfected her method of reverse-painting in acrylic on Plexiglas. Rossi also began using fields of tiny dots to render surreal, bulging body forms.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s Rossi became increasingly involved with her study of Indian painting, including three trips to India over the course of the 1980s. In particular she appreciated the hyper-logical narratives and simple handling of space that characterized the Indian tradition, concepts which she began incorporating in her own paintings.10 Although they remain largely abstract, Rossi’s works from the late 1970s and 1980s feature “characters” made out of noodle-like lines, sometimes with appendages resembling heads or limbs. They inhabit vaguely architectural spaces fitted with stairs, corners, and furniture, not unlike the simple spaces that encapsulate the narratives of Indian painting.
Rossi has continued to exhibit her work in group shows around the country, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (in a show of American drawings in 1973 and in the 1975 Biennial), the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin, the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1991. Her work is in the collections of institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts Vienna.
[Retrieved on October 12, 2021 from http://chicagoimagists.com/#artists/barbararossi]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
French, 1864 - 1901
