Ray yoshida biography
Home / General Biography Information / Ray yoshida biography
Tenaciously applying himself to the endless potentials of metamorphic form and the shifting of shape and placement, his collages of images cut from comic papers were rearranged to suggest new visual events. 1895-2010 (bulk 1950-2005)
Forlorn Objects and the Artist
For Yoshida, Chicago was the city of objects and images—a never-ending range of things and connections that triggered ideas and creative energy.
Although his home environment retains a highly personal and imaginative attachment to the vernacular, it was built through the process of collecting and/or arranging rather than making. Housed at 1944 North Wood Street, it ranged from drawings by self-taught artists Joseph Yoakum and Jesse Howard to tramp art, tattoo sheets, and whirly-gigs; from mass-produced metal toys and postcards to store signage; from thrift store treasures to African masks; and from works of art by esteemed colleagues to religious ex-votos.
A 1990 film entitled, “The Individuality of the Inanimate Object: The Collection of the Ray Yoshida,” offers insight into his interests:
I’m interested in permutations of one idea or possible form. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc., 1-19.
John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, Ray Yoshida and His Spheres of Influence (Chicago: The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, 2011), 3.
(1930-2009)
Ray Yoshida taught at the Art Institute of Chicago for four decades and influenced generations of artists.
Not always knowing what the tables and blankets strewn on the ground would support, but trusting that in his role of an artist, he would be able to re-value the ordinary into something new and strange again. For many people close to Yoshida, it was also a chance to honor their uncle, their brother, their teacher, their friend.
As the Yoshida collection was being unpacked for exhibition, each object and artwork conjures a moment in Ray Yoshida’s legacy: Reassembling a wall dedicated to the works of his Imagists friends and the generations of students that came afterwards; placing the works of Joseph Yoakum above a golden handmade table built with sewing spools; marching the myriad of silent butlers along the length of the wall; carefully securing masks from around the world so as they banter with the candid words of Jesse Howard; hanging an expansive Roger Brown painting over a line-up of Adirondack tables, Lee Godie, and a game of Chinese Checkers; unwrapping pocket-sized soldiers, life-sized robots, diminutive scarecrows, race cars by the dozens, backgrounds of buttons, deliberating doll parts, masses of memory jars, buried gems, and proud artifacts.
His passing felt recent to many people. He writes that he was “influenced by Ray’s emphasis on drawing from personal experience so that one’s art and life merge.”[20] Most importantly, Brown collected art by his peers in Chicago, works by self-taught artists, ethnographphic art and objects from popular culture, a practice inspired by Yoshida. Yoshida himself was a very private person, as was his collection.
And I hunt for them whenever it’s possible to find them.[23]
More than collecting commemorative stamps or spoons, Yoshida was seeking out thing-power as an artist. Maxwell Street was more than an outdoor market. Intuitive, ravenous, and competitive, these artists were on the hunt, honing their skills and deepening their ability to not just look, but to see.
With internet, and with enough money, you could make a collection of tin toys in one weekend. New York: Schocken Books 1969.
Bennett, Jane. Some even openly admit their drug usuage. The artists’ histories, ways of learning, and reasons for art-making are widely varied, though they share having a powerful connection to home-as-art-environment; each expresses the ineffable qualities of place according to nativist understandings and insights.
But it was also a way for his friends, colleagues, and students to understand him as a person. 2011.
[22] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press), 6.
[23] The Individuality of the Inanimate Object. Almost all the building that lined Roosevelt, Maxwell, Halsted, and the side streets have been razed.