The Ordinary Reality Behind the American Dream

Suellen Rocca: Pioneering Visual Language and Domestic Symbolism in American Art

Suellen Rocca (1943–2020), a founding member of the influential Chicago-based artist collective known as the Hairy Who, remains a distinctive voice in American contemporary art. Rocca’s visual language, forged early in her development as an artist, combines elements of Pop Art, Surrealism, and personal symbolism to explore the complexities of domestic life, gender roles, and societal expectations. The exhibition Suellen Rocca: Good Things and Bad Things at Matthew Marks Gallery (running through April 19) presents a robust retrospective of Rocca’s diverse and emotionally resonant works, spanning a career that lasted over five decades.

The Hairy Who and Beyond

Rocca first came to prominence with the Hairy Who, a group of six artists who exhibited together from 1966 to 1969. While the group shared a penchant for vibrant colors, graphic forms, and irreverent humor, each member developed an individualistic aesthetic. Rocca’s contributions stood out for their narrative strength and deeply personal content. Although united with her peers by a rejection of mainstream Modernism, she maintained an introspective approach distinct from the group’s more boisterous sensibilities.

Visual Language as Symbolic Code

By 1964, Rocca had synthesized a unique pictorial system that she would refine throughout her life. Described as a form of visual or picture writing, her images evoke a lexicon of domesticity and femininity: beds, handbags, engagement rings, houses, palm trees, and hands appear regularly. These motifs are not simply illustrations — they are semiotic tools that prompt the viewer to interpret meaning, much like words in a poem or hieroglyphics in an ancient text.

This symbolic approach is evident in paintings such as “Untitled” (2020), comprising four panels with isolated pictograms like empty beds, legs, and birds, suggesting themes of isolation, loss, or transition. Similarly, her graphite and watercolor works of the same year depict repetitive motifs whose mundane familiarity — a house, a hand, a nude figure — is rendered sinister or strange through composition and context.

Manipulating the Familiar

Rocca’s engagement with 1950s and ’60s advertising imagery played a pivotal role in shaping her subject matter. By appropriating these symbols of postwar American domestic prosperity — marriage, housekeeping, child-rearing — she simultaneously critiqued and reimagined a version of femininity that was imposed by consumer culture.

In her 1968 piece “Purse Curse,” Rocca transformed an actual plastic handbag into an art object, painting images onto its surface to interrogate the object’s function and symbolic weight. This transformation of the handbag — a classic emblem of feminine identity and consumer desire — underscores Rocca’s ability to use physical and symbolic objects as carriers of deeper psychological meaning.

The Cryptic Power of “Lamp Poem”

One of Rocca’s most enigmatic works, “Lamp Poem” (c. 1969), challenges the viewer’s expectations with its blue lamp at the center, a house emitting smoke from its chimney, and radiating black lines suggesting light or energy. Around the edges of the canvas, hand-lettered utterances — “ohh,” “ahh,” “mmm” — lend an auditory and poetic dimension. What seems at first glance a simple domestic scene becomes unsettling and mysterious, raising questions about the comforts and limits of traditional domesticity.

Similarly, in “Hidden Danger Lady” (1984–2012), Rocca uses graphite and colored pencil to compose a humanoid creature whose form — including exaggerated pink hands — draws viewers into an abstracted but palpable sense of tension. The pink breaks the black-and-white continuity, metaphorically spotlighting psychological or emotional forces that remain unnamed.

Themes of Constraint and Aspiration

A recurring tension in Rocca’s work is the duality of desire and confinement. Domestic imagery — homes, beds, engagement rings — may simultaneously represent achievement and imprisonment. In this way, Rocca echoes broader feminist critiques from the 1960s and ’70s that examined the contradictions embedded in the “American Dream,” particularly in women’s roles within it.

Paintings such as “Ocean Ladies” (1988) and “Clean and Unclean” (1983) further interrogate this complexity by weaving fantastical or ritualistic scenes into compositions rooted in everyday life. Often surreal in tone, these works express emotional ambiguity — a cocktail of nostalgia, alienation, comfort, and unease.

Legacy and Influence

Until her passing in 2020, Suellen Rocca continued to refine her thematic and formal interests. The inclusion of her late works in this exhibition — such as graphite drawings from 2020 — reveals her enthusiasm for experimentation and her continued pursuit of poetic visual storytelling. Despite working within a relatively constrained set of symbols, Rocca’s inventiveness rarely faltered, unders