Miyoko Ito was an American artist known for her watercolor and abstract oil paintings and prints. Ito was part of an informal group of like-minded, but visually diverse Chicago painters, self-named the "Allusive Abstractionists" and formed in 1981. The group, which also included William Conger, Richard Loving and Frank Piatek, was formed to spark dialogue and make space for a wider conception of abstraction that included more subjective, metaphorical work. Though tangentially involved with the Chicago Imagists, Ito's own style diverged and synthesized cubism and surrealism.

William Conger is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of abstraction descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic space and light and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations. He is a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art. In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the new style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s. In his essay for Conger's fifty-year career retrospective, Donald Kuspit called Conger art-historically daring for forging a path of subjective abstraction after minimalism had allegedly purged painting of an inner life. Despite being abstract, his work has a strong connection to Chicago's urban, lakeside geography and displays idiosyncratic variations of tendencies identified with Chicago Imagist art. A hallmark of Conger's career has been his enduring capacity for improvisation and discovery within self-prescribed stylistic limits.