Art in Film Series Presented by Pentangle & the Hall Art Foundation: screens Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, (1)

Art in Film

A series Presented by Pentangle Arts & the Hall Art Foundation Featuring: Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists

Join us for the launch of Art in Film, a new collaborative film series presented by Pentangle Arts and the Hall Art Foundation — where cinema meets visual art to spark dialogue, deepen understanding, and celebrate creative expression.

Thursday, November 20st

Lobby Opens: 6:30 PM

Showtime: 7:00 PMTown Hall Theater, Woodstock, VT

Film: Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists

This vibrant and eye-opening documentary tells the story of a group of 1960s Chicago artists who challenged the art world’s norms with wild colors, surreal humor, and bold individuality.

Following the screening, stay for an engaging post-film discussion and drinks in the lobby, where we’ll explore the connections between the film, the current Gladys Nilsson exhibition on view at the Hall Art Foundation through November, and the power of art to bring people together. Whether you're an art lover, film buff, or curious mind, come share the experience of how stories behind the art can inspire conversations — just like walking through a gallery.

About the Hall Art Foundation:

Founded in 2007, the Hall Art Foundation makes available postwar and contemporary art works from its own collection and that of Andrew and Christine Hall for the enjoyment and education of the public. In Reading, Vermont our campus of converted galleries, situated on a former dairy farm, consists of a 19th-century stone farmhouse, three barns, as well as a reception center and cafe. Our property’s 5 historic buildings make up approximately 6,000 sq. feet of museum-quality exhibition space. The farmhouse and barns sit next to a waterfall on a tributary of the Black River, and are surrounded by approximately 400 acres of pastures, hayfields and extensive woodland. Outdoor sculptures by world-renowned artists are installed throughout the grounds. Rotating, temporary exhibitions of contemporary art are held seasonally, from May through November.

About the Film:

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.

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. The film is narrated by Chicago theater legend Cheryl Lynn Bruce, and propelled by an original score for cello and voice by composer Tomeka Reid.