Don Baum (1922 – October 28, 2008) was an American curator, artist and educator, most known as a key impresario and promoter of the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists that had an enduring impact on American art in the later twentieth century. Described by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) as "an indispensable curator of the Chicago school," Baum was known for lively and irreverent exhibitions that offered fresh perspectives combining elements of Surrealism and Pop and that broke down barriers between schooled and untrained, or so-called outsider artists. From 1956 to 1972, Baum was exhibitions director at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center. It was there, in the 1960s, that he became involved with a group of young artists he exhibited as "Hairy Who" that later expanded to become the Chicago Imagists. That group included Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum. Baum mounted two major shows at the MCA that featured the emerging artists in their first museum exhibitions: "Don Baum Sez: 'Chicago Needs Famous Artists'" (1969) and "Made in Chicago" (1973), which shaped a vision of Chicago's art world as a place of meticulous craftsmanship and vernacular inspiration.
Baum's curatorial and artistic work was widely covered in publications including: Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Art Magazine, Time, Newsweek, New Art Examiner, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News, and the New York Times. His own art work is part of major public collections, including National Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many. In addition to his curatorial work and artistic production, Baum was a longtime educator at several Chicago institutions, notably Roosevelt University (1948–1984).
Life and career
Baum was born Charles Donald Baum in Escanaba, Michigan. He attended Michigan State College before coming to Chicago in the early 1940s to pursue his interest in art, initially at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then at the University of Chicago where he studied art history and earned a PhD in 1947. As a young artist, Baum participated in the influential Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) student-led Momentum Exhibits of the late 1940s and early 1950s; his work was also chosen for more than ten of AIC's prestigious "Chicago and Vicinity" surveys, beginning in 1946, and later included in the traveling show "Twenty-Five Chicago Artists" (1963).
In the 1950s, Baum was teaching at Roosevelt University and the Hyde Park Art Center, where he was named exhibitions director in 1956. It was here that he became increasingly visible in the 1960s and 1970s as a promoter of a figurative "Chicago School" of art that ran counter to the prevailing abstract current of New York City. Critic Franz Schulze would later say, "He became a little empire to himself...not so much an artist as an impresario." During that time, Baum's influence expanded as he served on the board of trustees of the MCA in Chicago (1974-1986) and as chairman of its Exhibitions Committee (1974–79). Throughout this time, Baum continued to develop his own art, which he exhibited extensively. Baum died in Evanston, Illinois, in October 2008 at the age of 86.
The Hairy Who and Chicago Imagists
In 1964, Baum was approached at the Hyde Park Art Center by artists Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson and James Falconer about a group exhibit. They put together a show that also included Art Green, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum, titled "Hairy Who" (1966), an off-handed inside joke about local art critic, Harry Bouras. The six artists showed there together twice more (1967 and 1968). The informal group, and Baum, received national attention, with subsequent shows at the San Francisco Art Institute, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Baum continued to organize notable shows there such as "Nonplussed Some" and "False Image" (1968), and "Marriage, Chicago Style" (1970), with an expanded group of artists.
By the early 1970s, the Hairy Who artists came to be known collectively as the Chicago Imagists, a name critic Franz Schulze is also credited with coining. Their work was generally figurative, quirky and personal, and shared an interest in the surreal, the grotesque, the fantastical, and "low," folk, or outsider culture. Members of this (also informal) "group" included Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, Barbara Rossi, Irving Petlin, Kerig Pope, and Ray Yoshida, among others. The group was the subject of a 2014 documentary by director Leslie Buchbinder, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists.