AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

Barbara Rossi (1940-2023) was a preeminent member of the Chicago Imagists, a loose collective of artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid 20th century who frequently exhibited together and produced a striking body of Surrealist-influenced art. Rossi is primarily known for her paintings, drawings, and prints, which she produced on substrates as diverse as paper, masonite, plastic, and textiles, often incorporating elements of collage and mixed media. Thematically, Rossi’s artistic style is characterized by grotesque abstractions, with figural representational components such as teeth, hair, hands, and feet rendered in her distinctive style of fine lines and subtle coloration. A recent acquisition of 24 of Rossi’s prints on a variety of synthetic fabrics were acquired by the Textiles curatorial department at the Art Institute of Chicago just before her death in 2023. These joined a selection of over 70 works on paper by Rossi in the Prints and Drawings department. A corpus of her work including a selection of these prints and textiles were brought together in the Four Chicago Artists exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 2024. This presented an opportunity for conservators across the disciplines of textiles and paper to perform a technical analysis and comparison of her materials and methods on paper and textile substrates. 

Processes developed by fine artists and commercial printers have resulted in distinct combinations of methods, materials, tools, equipment, terminology, and traditions that are often disparate between printing on textiles versus paper substrates. Using equipment and materials intended for paper print production to print on textiles,however, does have recognized art historical precedents, including James Ensor’s influential 19th-century experiments with etching on satin weave silk. In the 1960s and 1970s, Rossi drew on these histories to produce several sets of monoprints using the same etching plates across widely varied textile and paper substrates. These series, created by mixing techniques and materials, resulted in unique impressions from the printing plates as they were worked and re-worked for each print. Our research explores the social and art historical context in which these works were made, complemented by a technical exploration of Rossi’s textile substrates as well as a comparison of the visual and aesthetic qualities of the prints on textiles with the more well-known prints on paper. Analytical methods include imaging, XRF, FTIR, polarized light microscopy, stereomicroscopy, and analysis of paper and textile manufacturing.