Tag: chicago

Luis Medina

The Photography of Luis Medina

Born in Havana in June of 1942, Luis Medina was a Cuban-American photographer based in Chicago, whose work focused on the documentation of marginalized groups, such as the gay and Latino communities. During his childhood, he attended a private military school until 1958 when, at the age of sixteen, he left for Spain to  complete his education. In Spain, Medina met the exiled Cuban poet and writer Gastón Baquero, who introduced him to Spanish literature, painting, and architecture. He toured through Europe, working a series of jobs to finance his trip, and visited Italy, Germany and France.

 In 1961, Luis Medina migrated to Miami, Florida, and was reunited with his mother and stepfather, who had immigrated from Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Supporting himself with temporary jobs, he studied history, philosophy and sociology at Miami Dade Junior College, where he graduated with honors in 1967. At Miami Dade, Medina reunited with old friends, among whom was his closest friend José Lopez, a fellow student from the military academy in Havana. 

Sensing he was stagnating in Miami, Medina left the influence of his parents’ Cuban culture and relocated to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with dreams of becoming a sculptor. Reaching a similar decision about life in Miami, José Lopez also moved to Chicago to attend its Art Institute. The two friends found two American mentors at the Institute: Harold Allen, a teacher who was an architectural photographer, and Hugh Edwards, who was the Institute’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. 

A Mormon in upbringing, Harold Allen was a steadfast, quiet man who was well informed in art history and proficient as a photographer. It was Allen who first instilled in Medina a fascination for photography. In working with Allen on site photograph projects, Medina learned how to calculate a precise point of view and capture the quality of light. Self-educated in French literature, Art history and American history, Hugh Edwards came from a working-class family. A friend of musician Duke Ellington, he was trained in classical music, appreciated a wide range of singers and motion pictures, and was well-read in the works of Faulkner, Proust, Whitman, and other notable authors. Through these mentors, Medina and Lopez gained an unique education in photography and North American culture. 

Luis Medina turned his artistic interests to photography in a collaborative effort with José Lopez. They had their first joint museum exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973; versions of the show traveled to Finland in 1974 and Australia in 1976 as a representative of North American photography. After being introduced to Hugh Edward’s Puerto Rican friends, Medina and Lopez began taking images of the diverse cultures in the city of Chicago. In the fall of 1973, they worked with an art historian and an architect in Illinois’s Quincy and Adams counties photographing its architecture and local crafts for the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration’s project, “Community Rediscovery ’76″.

In 1974, Medina and Lopez worked together to document the campus of the University of Chicago for a book entitled “Dreams in Stone”. With their aesthetic and personal points of view diverging, their intimate eleven-year partnership eventually dissolved. After an illness in 1977, Lopez moved back to Miami and gave up photography; Medina inherited their mutual work and stayed on in Chicago. With Lopez’z departure, Medina’s photography shifted in focus; his sudden domestic solitude generated less optimistic and more introspective work. Rekindling his interest in human contradictions and tragedies, he began to develop a more private side of work which, more satisfying and outspoken, gave voice to his Cuban origins.

Luis Medina began a series of photographs on Latin-American life in Chicago, which included Puerto Rican Day parades and local weddings. He also began to photograph Chicago’s LGBTQ scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of work that documented the community from a unique inside perspective. Beginning in 1977, Medina started photographing the altars and ceremonies of the African-Cuban religious folk cult known as Santeria. Although he continued to produce architectural photos on commission, the main focus of his work became his immediate surroundings. Seeing the explosion of territorial graffiti throughout the city, Medina started photographing Chicago’s neighborhood youth gangs and their personalized graffiti. Through time, he earned the trust of the gangs and began to also shoot their portraits. A solo exhibition of both portraits and photographed graffiti was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980. 

Beginning in late 1984, Medina was diagnosed with a cytomegalovirus infection, which often is associated with AIDS; his infection possibly developed as early as 1981 and had now become debilitating. Medina lost partial control of his left hand but, through a course of handwriting exercises, slowly regained his dexterity. He kept his rapidly progressing illness a secret from his family and friends and continued to believe in his survival. By June of 1985, Medina was with his parents in Miami and knew he was dying. Surrounded by his parents and a few friends, Luis Medina died, at the age of forty-three, at Jackson Memorial Hospital on October 12th of 1985. 

The publishing of Luis Medina’s work after his death was accomplished through the efforts of his mother, Olga Bohorques, who was determined that his work would not be forgotten, and members of Chicago’s Photo Circle and its Art Institute. A retrospective of Medina’s work, entitled “Facts and Fables by Luis Medina, Photographer”, was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993.  His work also appeared in the 2018 group exhibition, “Never So Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950-1980”. held as part of Art Design Chicago.

Note: A collection of Medina’s photographs, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, is housed in the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection. The collection is comprised of approximately twenty-two thousand items of mixed media: slides, silver gelatin prints, negatives and color prints. The collection is unprocessed but open for research.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto, “Snow and Car”, 1948-1953, Chicago

Born in San Francisco to Japanese parents on June 14, 1921, Yasuhiro Ishimoto went with his parents to Japan at age three and grew up in Kochi, Japan. He returned to the United States in 1939 in order to study agriculture at the University of California, but was detained at the Amachi Internment Camp in Armach, Colorado from 1942 to 1944.

After World War II, Ishimoto moved to Chicago to study architecture at Northwestern University (1946). He transferred to the Institute of Design in 1948 to study photography, earning a BS in 1952. A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, Yasuhiro Ishimoto was an important figure in the cross-pollination of photographic ideas and styles between American and Japanese photography.

Ishimoto’s portrait of a city, “Chicago, Chicago”, published as a book in 1969, is a rich study full of the details of time and place. The cluster of white mannequin busts in the background of one of his photographs highlights Ishimoto’s strength in using environmental details to question or add subtle commentary about the individuals portrayed – and about their relationship to society at large.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was a part of the time and place of his subject, a fact of photography that is simultaneously restrictive and beneficial. Moving through Chicago as both citizen and visitor, he presented highly original visual documents that speak eloquently for the culture of the city in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ed Paschke

Ed Paschke, “Gypsy Blue”, 2001, Oil on Linen, 36 x 40 Inches

Ed Paschke was born in Chicago where he spent most of his life as an important painter. He was initially associated in the late 1960s with the second generation of Chicago Imagists who called themselves The Hairy Who. He received his B.F.A. from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1961 and his M.F.A. in 1970.

Between 1961 and 1970, Paschke lived for a time in New York where he easily came under the influence of the Pop Art movement, in part, because of his interests as a child in animation and cartoons. His fascination with the print media of popular culture led to a portrait-based art of cultural icons. Paschke used the celebrity figure, real or imagined, as a vehicle for explorations of personal and public identity with social and political implications.

Although his style is representational, with a loose affiliation to Photorealism, Paschke’s art plays heavily upon expressionist distortion and abstract form. The often grotesque cast to his paintings suggests an affiliation in spirit with Surrealism, a movement that has historically interested Chicago artists and collectors.

In the 1970s, Paschke’s figures, now presented primarily as headshots in extreme close-ups, began to wear masks and unusual headgear. Colors became electric; forms were increasingly distorted by video-like disturbances; facial features of mouth, eyes, and nose were hollowed out or veiled with aggressive color shapes. These features became standard elements of Paschke’s disquieting and compelling art.

Jack Balas

Three Paintings by Jack Balas, Oil and Enamel on Canvas

Born in Chicago, Jack Balas earned a BFA and MFA in sculpture from Northern Illinois University. He first began painting in the 1980s and was swept away by the western landscape. After college Balas moved to Los Angeles and worked as a cross-country art-shipper, driving a month-on/month-off route between California and New York that took him regularly through Scottsdale and Tucson.

Eventually Jack Balas moved away from sculpture and began making paintings that recreated the narrative feel of maps, annotated with numbers and texts, and brief stories with images inspired by his experiences as an art trucker. Balas began painting in earnest while teaching figure drawing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Balas’ goal is to create transcendent images that reveal the fictions surrounding great paintings as well as speak to the present with text and mark making. His current work focuses on the depiction of athletic young men, offered as a counterpoint to the unexamined tradition of equating great painting with the female nude. Balas’ men are presented as Everyman, – variable, philosophical, vulnerable, flexible and eager to please.

Michael Pajon

The Collage Artwork of Michael Pajon

Michael Pajon, born in 1979 in Chicago, currently lives and works in New Orleans. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking. Eventually gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved, Pajon worked closely as an assistant/studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick.

During this time, Pajon started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children’s book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed tales of Americana. Pajon’s work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; Nau-haus Art Space, Houston, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

“These maps, postcards, children’s book illustrations, matchbooks, sheet music, and calling cards are the guts and gristle of common things people collected over a life, spared the fate of being buried in the rubble and shadows of once prosperous towns. This group of work contemplates the most humble of human remains: old matchbooks from junk shops, antique postcards and books, sheet music, cracker jack toys, and other objects once treasured, lost and resurrected. By collaging these elements amidst drawings and other media, I create small relationships to arrive at a whole image. Like delicate strands of DNA, these tiny pieces in combination hold the key to unique identity – the common as well as the fantastic.” – Michael Pajon

John Himmelfarb

John Himmelfarb, “Uzzle”, 2001, Color Intaglio on Bluff Rives Paper, 20 x 23 ¾ Inches, Edition of 25

The Chicago-based artist John Himmelfarb, for n in Chicago in 1946, is a master printmaker, working frequently and simultaneously with lithography, intaglio, serigraphy, and the computer. A distinctive calligraphic quality unites this work, and as John Brunetti has observed, it reflects his belief that drawing is “an extension of handwriting, closest to recording the immediacy of the artist’s observations and states of mind; a fusion of verbal and visual language.”

Uzzle possesses the dense field of symbols and signs culled from Neolithic pictographs, Asian and Arabic alphabets and global religious symbols typically found in his prints. On February 16, 2001, the artist oversaw the printing by Gary Day using a plywood plate for the brown areas and zinc plates for the remaining colors. He was assisted by Julie Sopscak and Melissa Corwin.

Vivian Dorothy Maier

 

Photography of Vivian Dorothy Maier

Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide.

During her lifetime, Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished, and she never printed many of her negatives. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier’s photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier’s prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier’s photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response.

In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier’s photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went “viral”, with thousands of people expressing interest. Critical acclaim and interest in Maier’s work quickly followed, and since then, Maier’s photographs have been exhibited in North America, Europe, Asia and South America while her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films.

Netflix Streaming has a great documentary about Vivian Maier’s life and discovery and subsequent printing of her work. There are also many interviews with families who employed Vivian Maier as a nanny. A great film about a little known very talented artist.

Notes: Images 5 and 9 are self-portraits.

Kinuko Y. Craft

Kinuko Y. Craft: Illustrations

Kinuko Y Craft is a graduate, BFA 1962, of The Kanazawa Municipal College of Fine and Industrial Art (known in Japan as The Kanazawa Bidai). She was born in Japan and came to the United States in the early sixties where she studied design and illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago. Subsequently, she worked for a number of years in well known Chicago art studios.

By the end of the decade Craft’s work was in wide demand and she began her long and successful career as a free-lance illustrator. For most of this time she worked in editorial and advertising markets where her work regularly appeared in national magazines and newspapers. Since the mid 1990’s, Kinuko Y Craft has concentrated on fantasy book jackets, poster designs and children’s picture books.

Anish Kapoor

 

Anish Kapoor, “Cloud Gate”. Stainless Steel, Millennium Park, Chicago

Anish Kapoor’s sculpture “Cloud Gate” was constructed between the 2004 and 2006, consisting of 168 stainless steel plates which were welded together. It is popularly known as “The Bean”, the design was inspired by the look and properties of liquid mercury; the sculptures surface reflects Chicago’s skyline.

The exterior is highly polished with no visible seams. On the underside where visitors are able to walk around is the ‘omphalos’, or nave, that warps and muliplies reflections. The volume is  approximately  42 feet x 66 feet x 33 feet having a pronounced weight of 98 long tons. The volume approximately is 42 feet x 66 feet x 33 feet having a pronounced weight of 98 long tons.