Suellen Rocca

Suellen Rocca (née Krupp; October 2, 1943 – March 26, 2020) was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who turned to representational art.

[1] She began attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago when she was in elementary school and knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of eight.

[9] Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

In an article from the Art Institute of Chicago's website on the artist they describe her art with the Hairy Who and individually, "During the Hairy Who years, Rocca’s visual vocabulary expressed her personal taste as much as her experiences as a newlywed and young mother.

She employed signs and symbols drawn from everything from the rebus-like pictograms in kindergarten reading primers to the jewelry trade catalogs in her husband’s family’s store.

In both its grid-like arrangements of repetitive glyphs punctuated by onomatopoeic words such as ohh, ahh, and eek, and the centrally located imagery framed by decorative borders, Rocca's intuitive and nebulous compositions stand apart from other Hairy Who work.