Art Green (artist)

In 2006, the University of Waterloo gave him emeritus status.

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 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." His interest in illusion extended off of the canvas and actually began affecting the shape of the canvas itself by the 1980s. The canvases, too, appeared to be constructed from individual pieces of polished glass; his paintings became monuments to a secular campy artificiality. Nothing was quite as it seemed in these canvases, where Green was more interested in disrupting the narrative via a manipulation of both form - i.e. he uses shaped canvas - and content - i.e. the scenes within his paintings appear cropped, giving only sensuous and flickering views of a hidden tale.

Finally, 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 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. He has been living in Canada ever since with two children, Catherine and Nicholas.

By the 1970s, Green had become increasingly interested in trompe l'oeil effects on his canvas. His paintings increasingly made use of a tape motif, which gave surface texture a pictorial representation; it's almost as if there is a picture within a picture in these paintings. An erotic nostalgia pervades his mixed up and overlapping still lifes, as he combines fragments of contemporary life into highly stylized and symmetric patterns. His paintings take on a prism-like appearance as he reinterpreted familiar images. Increasingly so, he turns away from the figure and focuses only on cropped views of fingernails and hands.

Green first came to prominence in 1966, when he joined five other recent Art Institute graduates for the first of a series of group exhibitions called 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.

Between 1966 and 1967 Green worked at various Chicago public schools teaching 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 a position as the Chair of the Fine Arts Department. There he taught studio and art history courses. In 1969, Green married Natalie Novotny (also a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago), whose Art Institute education in pattern and fabric design became a strong influence on his work. He also accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University as an assistant professor.

Green was born in Frankfort, Indiana. His father was a civil engineer who designed bridges; his mother crafted quilts and grew flowers. Green initially set out to be a car designer, though he switched gears to graphic design when he started at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. However, during his first year he had trouble finding enough graphic design classes to take, so he switched his focus once again to painting. In 1965, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Art Green was one of the original six members of the Hairy Who. This was a group of artists who studied together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later exhibited together six times in the 1960s. Their first show was at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 1966; subsequently, they exhibited twice more at the Hyde Park Art Center, once at the San Francisco Art Institute, once at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., and once at the Visual Arts Gallery in New York. Though their primary interest in exhibiting together stemmed from the fact that they were all friends and colleagues, there are stylistic similarities in their artwork. All of these artists' work have tendencies towards a cartoon style or pop art; there is a high degree of visual resolution in their drawings and paintings and a sense of horror vacui fills their canvases.

Arthur Green RCA (born 1941) was one of the original Hairy Who members from Chicago, a group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited together in the 1960s and 1970s and made representational art with a slight surrealist touch. He was also a member of the University of Waterloo's faculty for over 30 years. His painting style mixes pop-art motifs with surrealist tendencies. His upbringing in Chicago and its vicinity may have influenced him, from the accessibility of the Art Institute of Chicago to the architecture of Louis Sullivan, but he also may have been influenced by advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s that had undertones of sexuality. His paintings drew from American popular imagery, but complicated it, often using the full spectrum of vibrant colors and combining trompe l'oeil effects to play with the viewer's sense of balance.