Artist: Karl Wirsum (American, 1939 – 2021)
Title: Dune Not For Saki
Date: 1991
Medium: Color lithograph
Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 1996.75
Chicago artist Karl Wirsum’s humorous imagination comes to life in the colorful lithograph Dune Not For Saki, exemplifying Wirsum’s individualization of characters that appear in his artwork. It features a green and turquoise female in a red outfit lounging against a background of colorful shapes. The woman’s body is detailed with graphic highlights, while her undefined environment is full of yellow and pink amorphous shapes outlined in solid red, complementing the woman’s red outfit and hair. All the forms are contained by Wirsum’s thick outlining, reinforcing the distortion and corralling the interaction between bodies and shapes into organized chaos.
A related print made fourteen years later, Swat Meet I, similarly depicts a cartoonish figure chasing two large blue bat-like insects. The man’s motion creates a distortion of his red torso, morphing his body into the structure of his yellow shirt. His frantic movement and wayward limbs are challenged by the same bold outlining that defines the woman in Dune Not For Saki. Reminiscent of many Wirsum prints, the characters have disproportionate faces and exaggerated expressions that further animate them. Wirsum creates a tension between fluid figures and their rigid, cartoon-like outlines, conjuring an animated dialogue on paper.
Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Wirsum attributed his early inspiration to comics, cartoons, rhythm and blues music, and Chicago’s famous Maxwell Street Market. Wirsum began taking Saturday art classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and immersed himself in the arts. Wirsum received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961, where he later became a professor of painting and drawing. Aside from a few years in the 1970s, when he taught at Sacramento State College, Wirsum taught at the School of the Art Institute and was a lifelong, dedicated Chicago resident.
Wirsum’s earliest impact on the Chicago art scene was defined by his first group show, the 1966 “Hairy Who” exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center. Curated by Don Baum, the exhibition featured work from Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Wirsum. These artists would go on to formally identify themselves as the “Hairy Who?” and eventually became known as the Chicago Imagists. The 1966 exhibition brought these artists together, working as a collective to celebrate the style that connected them: “vibrant colors, bold graphic styles, and a penchant for humor and irreverence.” The Imagist style did not take itself too seriously and poked fun at formal fine art rules.
Karl Wirsum’s artworks are colorful, chaotic, and joyous, and have playful titles. Dune Not For Saki, for example, is a wordplay on the biblical verse “do not forsake me.” Swat Meet I refers to a “swap meet,” but changes a letter to refer to the action of swatting at insects.
The images redefine cartoon characters, elevating these figures from the scale of comic book pages into monumental portraits. In his interviews, Wirsum welcomed his subjects to explore their existence off the page and celebrated this joyous autonomy of his work: “My characters are alive…On completion of [the] drawing, the character hops out of this two-dimensional paper confines and achieves a standing position on top of the board. He then hops off the table, onto the floor, running into a mouse hole in the wall or some other convenient portal that times him into a cartoon environment … That would be the way I perceive the images that I create, hoping there will be a long run on Broadway for them, so they are spared from the production being closed in the first week and their being sucked back into the ink bottle.”
Contributed by Helaina Harris, 2024–2025 Undergraduate Curatorial Intern
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
“Karl Wirsum,” The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed May 16, 2025. https://www.artic.edu/artists/37327/karl-wirsum
McKinney, Maureen Foertsch, “The Headliner: One Artist’s Evolution,” NPR Illinois, December 1, 2010. Accessed May 27, 2025. https://www.nprillinois.org/arts-life/2010-12-01/the-headliner-one-artists-evolution?
“An Interview with Karl Wirsum,” The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed May 26, 2025. https://www.saic.edu/news/interview-karl-wirsum?
Long, Zach “’Hairy Who? 1966–1969’”- looks back on the artists’ brash and beautiful work,” TimeOut, September 25, 2018. Accessed May 27, 2025. https://www.timeout.com/chicago/news/hairy-who-19661969-looks-back-on-the-artists-brash-and-beautiful-work-092518?
“Hairy Who? 1966-1969,” The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed May 26, 2025. https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2722/hairy-who-1966-1969
Rudick, Nicole, “Karl Wirsum’s Casting Call,” The Paris Review, September 13, 2017. Accessed June 1, 2025. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/13/karl-wirsums-casting-call
