Mary Lou Zelazny (born 1956, Chicago, Illinois, USA) is an American painter. Educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she was exposed to and trained with Ray Yoshida, Barbara Rossi, Hollis Sigler and others of that generation. [1] Completed Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1980.
Zelazny began her solo exhibition career at the Peter Miller Gallery Chicago in 1984, and through the years has had solo exhibitions with the Roy Boyd Gallery Chicago, Phyllis Kind Gallery (Chicago and New York City), and is currently represented by the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. The Hyde Park Art Center Chicago held a major retrospective of her work in 2009. [2] Her painting "Sea Walker" was exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago show, Surrealism: The Conjured Life (Nov 2015-June 2016). [3]
Known for her collage and paint works on canvas. Zelazny is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the SAIC. Her painting, "Made of Iron" was featured on the cover of the literary and art journal "Mission at Tenth" in 2014 [4] [5]
In addition to painting and teaching, she performed the role of "Ida Blue" in the 2012 animated film Consuming Spirits by Chris Sullivan.
Deb Sokolow is an American visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. Sokolow's work uses both image and text to conjure connections among historical events, celebrities, politicians, and her own personal history in order to spur new consideration of alternate possible realities. Her work has been exhibited widely and is part of a number of permanent collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Spertus Museum.
Sandra Binion is a Swedish-American artist based in Chicago whose artistic practice includes fine-art exhibitions, multimedia installations involving, and performance art. Her work has been performed and exhibited at museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals in the US, Europe, and Japan. Some of the venues that have featured her work include the Evanston Art Center, Link's Hall, Kunstraum (Stuttgart), The Goodman Theatre, and Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, and one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists active during the 1960s and 1970s. She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.
Gertrude Abercrombie was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists", Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and was friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work.
Suellen Rocca was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who turned to representational art. She exhibited with them at the Hyde Park Art Center from 1966 through 1969. She was curator of the art collection and director of exhibitions at Elmhurst College.
Phyllis Bramson is an American artist, based in Chicago and known for "richly ornamental, excessive and decadent" paintings described as walking a tightrope between "edginess and eroticism." She combines eclectic influences, such as kitsch culture, Rococo art and Orientalism, in juxtapositions of fantastical figures, decorative patterns and objects, and pastoral landscapes that affirm the pleasures and follies of romantic desire, imagination and looking. Bramson shares tendencies with the Chicago Imagists and broader Chicago tradition of surreal representation in her use of expressionist figuration, vernacular culture, bright color, and sexual imagery. Curator Lynne Warren wrote of her 30-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, "Bramson passionately paints from her center, so uniquely shaped in her formative years […] her lovely colors, fluttery, vignette compositions, and flowery and cartoony imagery create works that are really like no one else's. Writer Miranda McClintic said that Bramson's works "incorporate the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons."
Richard Wetzel is an American artist. He is best known for his oil paintings but also has exhibited collages and sculpture. In 1969 and 1970, Wetzel exhibited with the Chicago Imagists, a grouping of Chicago artists who were ascendant in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Michiko Itatani is a Chicago-based artist who was born in Osaka, Japan. After she received her BFA (1974) and MFA (1976) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1974 and 1976 respectively, she returned to her alma mater in 1979 to teach in the Painting and Drawing department. Through her work, Itatani explores identity, continuation, and finding one's way in the modern world. Her work depicts nude figures in an expressionist style. Itatani has received the Illinois Arts Council Artist's Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is collected in many museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Olympic Museum, Switzerland; Villa Haiss Museum, Germany; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada; Museu D'art Contemporani (MACBA), Spain; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea.
Liza Sylvestre is an American visual artist born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is known for detailed abstract mixed media paintings and drawings. Her current work explores new media such as installation and video art. Much of her work revolves around our sensory perceptions and misconceptions of the world around.
Carole Harmel is an American artist and photographer, who gained recognition for her provocative images of nudes in the 1970s and 1980s and still lifes combining photography with short narratives, wordplay and mixed media. Fundamental to Harmel's work is a questioning of reality and photographic conventions, a penchant for surrealism, and humor. The New Art Examiner described her nudes as having a "startling, queasy impact," "rich in ambiguity, discomforting in content." About her still lifes, critic Michael Weinstein wrote, "sophisticated academic criticism is fused with love of color and visual form to create images at once conceptually engaging and perceptually arresting."
Arthur Lerner is an American artist, known for his atmospheric figurative paintings and drawings, landscapes, and still lifes. He is sometimes described as a realist, but most critics observe that his work is more subjective than descriptive or literal. Associated with Chicago's influential "Monster Roster" artists early in his career, he shared their enthusiasm for expressive figuration, fantasy and mythology, and their existential outlook, but diverged increasingly in his classical formal concerns and more detached temperament. Critics frequently note in Lerner's art a sense of light that evokes Impressionism, delicate color and modelling that "flirts with dematerialization," and the draftsmanship that serves as a foundation for all of his work. The Chicago Tribune's Alan Artner lamented Lerner's comparative lack of recognition in relation to the Chicago Imagists as the fate of "an aesthete in a town dominated by tenpenny fantasts." Lerner's work has been extensively covered in publications, featured in books such as Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago, and acquired by public and private collections, including those of the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.
Eleanor Gorecki Himmelfarb was an American artist, teacher and conservationist known for semi-abstract paintings that reference the landscape and human figure, and for her work protecting woodlands in DuPage County, Illinois. She studied art history and design at the University of Chicago, natural history at the Morton Arboretum, and fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago. Critics characterize Himmelfarb as a modernist, who explored her subjects metaphorically through complex rhythmic compositions, stylized forms, and subtle coloration. Her work was featured in solo shows at the Evanston Art Center (retrospective), University Club of Chicago and Sioux City Art Center, and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, and Renaissance Society. Himmelfarb taught painting and design for four decades at several institutions, including over 30 years at the DuPage Art League. She was married to the painter, Sam Himmelfarb, and helped him design their house, the Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb Home and Studio in Winfield, Illinois, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Their son, John Himmelfarb, and grandchild, Serena Aurora, are also artists. Himmelfarb died at age 98 in Winfield in 2009.
Ann Toebbe is an American contemporary artist who has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Saatchi Gallery, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Monya Rowe Gallery, and Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Based in Chicago, she is best known for creating meticulously designed paintings and collages that depict the interiors of domestic life. In 2015, Vulture magazine art critic Jerry Saltz named one of Toebbe's exhibitions one of the year's 10 best. Toebbe has been featured in articles in Artforum, The New York Times, NY Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Art in America, and Hyperallergic, among others.
Frank Piatek is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. In Art in Chicago 1945-1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.
Joan Livingstone is an American contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author based in Chicago. She creates sculptural objects, installations, prints, and collages that reference the human body and bodily experience.
Lynne Warren an American curator and writer who worked from 1977 to 2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. She is a scholar of the Chicago Imagists, conceptual photography, Alexander Calder, and Chicago art from the mid-twenty-first century to the present. Sixty Inches from Center called her a "true pioneer in the field of contemporary art" in 2017.
Robert Paige is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator working across textile design, painting, collage, and sculpture based in Woodlawn, Chicago. As an artist and textile designer allied with the Black Arts Movement, Robert E. Paige trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked at the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Sears Roebuck & Company and Fiorio Milano design house in Italy. Paige was raised in Chicago's South Side where he continues to live and work, further developing his longstanding career in the decorative arts. His work visually and conceptually interrogates political and cultural themes that reflect both historical and contemporary African American art references, as well as traditional textile practices of West Africa.
Tony Phillips is an American artist and educator based in Chicago whose work has included painting, drawing and film. He is associated with figurative and surrealist currents of Chicago art in the later 20th century, without precisely being identified with such groups as the Imagists or The Hairy Who; critics have suggested that the lack of such affiliations has caused him and similar artists in the city to be comparatively overlooked. His art employs painterly, softly modeled representation that belies sometimes dark psychological explorations and fantastical or archetypal scenarios. Art in America critic Robert Berlind wrote, "Phillips's best pictures, with their particular tension between humor and eeriness, between the familiar and the eccentric, between the fanciful and the obsessive, are like a high-wire act, carried off in dream time."
Buzz Spector is an American artist and critic. Born in Chicago in 1948, he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1972. He received his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Chicago in 1978. Spector taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell University, and Washington University in St. Louis's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, where he is Emeritus Professor.