Suellen Rocca's Cha-Cha Couple Dance, Dance
Thursday, July 16, 2020
![Suellen Roccas Cha-Cha Couple Dance, Dance](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6978.jpg)
Suellen Rocca, Cha-Cha Couple, 1967. Smart Museum of Art. Detail photos Rachel Cohen.
Last week, I discovered that Suellen Rocca had died in March of this year. Her paintings have been on my mind since, and I want to share this wonderful, exuberant one, called Cha-Cha Couple, which I saw many times at the Smart Museum of Art during their Time is Now show about art on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s.
![](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6977.jpg)
The painting is quite large and nearly square. 71 1/2 by 67 1/2 inches. It was first exhibited at the Hyde Park Arts Center, which did a lot of shows of work by the Chicago Imagists. Rocca was an important figure in this movement and was interested in sharp delineation, and images found in popular culture.
![](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6983.jpg)
The Hyde Park Arts Center is a few blocks from us, and ordinarily the children would be in summer camp there. So imagining this painting in its original exhibition gives me a delightful feeling of a hazy summer night and paint recently dried and how it would have leapt off the wall and been ready to dance.
![](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6980.jpg)
The central dancing figures are based on an advertisement for the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, a popular national chain of dance studios.
![](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6989.jpg)
I took many square format pictures because that seemed the right way to think about its spatial geometry.
![](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6985.jpg)
It is a great painting. Completely alive.
![](https://rachelecohen.com/images/blog/IMG_6982.jpg)