Chicago-Style Modern Art with Everything! In the mid 1960s, the city of Chicago was an incubator for an iconoclastic group of young artists. Collectively known as the Imagists, they showed in successive waves of exhibitions with monikers that might have been psychedelic rock bands of the era - Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image. Kissing cousins to the contemporaneous international phenomenon of Pop Art, Chicago Imagism took its own weird, wondrous, in-your-face tack. Variously pugnacious, puerile, scatological, graphic, comical, and absurd, Chicago's diverse artists followed no trend, preferring a path they ferociously cleared for themselves.
Leslie Buchbinder is a Chicago-based writer & director, & the founder & Artistic Director of Pentimenti Productions. Her directorial debut was the award-winning “Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists,” a 2014 documentary chronicling the history and impact of an iconoclastic group of young artists from the School of the Art Institute. Slated for release in 2023, Buchbinder’s second feature is "H.C. Westermann: Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea,” a 3-D film about artist H.C. Westermann. Executive produced by the international art icon KAWS, the film features the voice of four-time Academy Award nominee Ed Harris; music by Laurie Anderson & The Kronos Quartet; & bespoke music compositions by MacArthur Genius Grant winner, Tomeka Reid. Prior to founding Pentimenti, Buchbinder began her career as a professional dancer with companies in Chicago and San Francisco, then pivoted to working in museum & arts public relations at The Kreisberg Group, (New York City), & thereafter established her own arts public relations company in Chicago that specialized in local & international p.r. for clients including Sara Lee Corporation; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Arts Club of Chicago; among others. In 2011, she was nominated to the Committee on Prints and Drawings of The Art Institute of Chicago; to the Advisory Board of the Chicago Film Archives in 2012; & to the Board of Trustees of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2021.
