Barbara Rossi, Chicago Imagist Who Painted with Humor and Wit, Dies at 83

Barbara Rossi, an artist associated with the Chicago Imagist group of the 1960s and ’70s, died at 83 on August 24. Her death was announced on Sunday by the John Michael Kohler Arts Foundation, which owns her collection.

Alongside artists like Karl Wirsum, Roger Brown, and Christina Ramberg, Rossi found a following in Chicago for her humorous art that exhibited an eccentric, playful sensibility. If her fame had long been confined mainly to Chicago, it has in recent years expanded beyond that city as an interest in the Imagists has grown.

The Chicago Imagists, a loose group of artists who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became known for art that drew equally on vernacular imagery and Surrealism. The art they produced was bound less by an aesthetic than a funky sensibility that did not cohere to Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, or any other movement considered the predominant one at the time.

Rossi is best known for reverse paintings done on Plexiglas, an unconventional method and medium that befit an unconventional artist. Many feature bloated bodies that press into one another in enclosed spaces.

When New York’s New Museum mounted a small Rossi show featuring some of these works in 2015, acclaim followed. New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote, “They represent bizarre, cartoonish figures consisting of lumpy, bulbous and squishy shapes without eyes, noses and mouths. They are like X-rays revealing subdermal viscera, which in turn suggest churning inner souls.”

Yet Rossi had not always set out to become an artist. Born in 1940 in Chicago, Rossi had been introduced to the Baltimore Catechism at a young age and had been a Catholic nun for a period. She ended up veering toward art, attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for an MFA. She would go on to show alongside Suellen Rocca, Ed Paschke, and other notable artists of the scene.

During the ’80s, she ended up spending more of her time studying Indian art, visiting the country and later writing a book on its artists’ vernacular painting practices. Curator Natalie Bell, the organizer of the 2015 New Museum show, once questioned Rossi about whether Indian miniature paintings had inspired her, and Rossi responded that there were indeed similarities between her cramped artworks and those pieces.

“It’s a special kind of image that lets us know how much there is in the world,” Rossi told Bell. “The abundance of realities is mind-blowing!”