Portrait #2

This photo etching is based on one of Rossi’s class pictures. After graduating from Saint Xavier College in Chicago in 1964 she spent several years as a nun. She then decided to pursue an artistic career, enrolling in the master’s program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968, where she later taught. She quickly became associated with the group known as the Chicago Imagists—sometimes referred to as the Hairy Who. Even as she moved into abstraction, her work continued to include references to her Catholic background in the form of thorns and other elements from the Passion of Christ.