Chicago Surrealist Group

Collaborations and projects

The group played a major role in organizing the World Surrealist Exhibition held at Gallery Black Swan in Chicago in 1976. As the name suggests, broader in scope than previous "international" exhibitions, it featured hundreds of works almost exclusively from contemporary participants in surrealism from thirty-one countries.

Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire was the title of the catalogue of the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition. It contains a number of texts and reproductions, as well as a blueprint of the layout of the gallery, with the location of the different "domains" into which the exhibition was organised.

The group also produced four issues of a journal, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, between 1970 and 1989. Participants in the group's activities have included Clarence John Laughlin, Gerome Kamrowski, Philip Lamantia, Tristan Meinecke and Franklin Rosemont. As participants past and present have been based in cities other than Chicago, the group has never been strictly defined by geography, despite its name. The group has worked with others, such as The Surrealist Group in Stockholm, with which it met in Chicago and Stockholm in 1986, publishing the International Surrealist Bulletin No. 1.