Chicago Part One

My apologies for not posting these sooner. For some reason, my internet is not letting me upload my images... This is some of the art that I saw in Chicago. This first exhibition was at the Sullivan Gallery which is a gallery for SAIC. This is where they have their MFA exhibition (which this year will have 130 MFA candidates). So, I've included some images of the space itself to give a sense of how that many people would fit! It was truly an amazing space. It was huge and I probably spent over an hour looking through the exhibition. There were huge windows along the one wall which let in natural light and had a great view of the city below. The exhibition that was in there was titled "Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence."

Ray Yoshida was a Chicago artist and taught for almost 50 years at SAIC. He was an integral part of the Chicago Imagists and served as their mentor. This exhibition shows his own personal work and how it changed over the years, as well as work from his personal collection, students' work and the work of other artists who were influenced by him. It was really great work and interesting to see the change in his work over the span of his career. He worked with appropriating comic book imagery and collaging the different elements. He would isolate specific parts to create a dialogue.

These are a couple views of the space. I believe that is State Street out the window there. From what I could tell there was a whole extra half of this space that continued beyond the doors, it was a gigantic space.

These are two pieces from the 60s. The first is an acrylic painting done in 1968 that is Untitled. The second image is a collage of comic book clippings and most of his early work consisted of appropriating comic book imagery by using actual materials from comics. In his later work, he revisited this style as you will see in some of my other pictures.

This is work from a student, Jim Nutt, who is one of the Chicago Imagists. I also saw a Jim Nutt exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art and will post pictures from that. He also experimented with collaging comic book images, and most of his early work was a mix of different little elements.

This is a collaboration with two of his former students Christina Ramberg and Barbara Rossi. This was made using the Surrealist "exquisite corpse" process. This was called Wrapsodent and was from 1974.

This image shows how the next work fits into the whole comic book appropriation theme. He had all sorts of collections of clippings and sketches that he made while creating his work.

These two were also acrylic paintings done in the 70s. The second one was Untitled, 1975.

Ray Yoshida eventually returned to using comic book imagery directly in his later work. He worked in this style until his death in early 2009. They even had his last unfinished collage in the show. The first collage is from image is from 2000 and is titled Eh! and the second is titled EWWWWWW!AAAHHHH!AWOOOOOOO! and was from 2002-03 (I will upload this as soon as I can get the internet to work properly....). It was a really great show and there seemed to be a lot of shows that had this "celebration of Chicago Art" theme going. It was really great to see the work and I will continue to post as long as I can upload the images!