Ray Yoshida
1930–2009
Introduction
Raymond "Ray" Kakuo Yoshida (October 3, 1930 – January 10, 2009) was an American artist known for his paintings and collages, and for his contributions as a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1959 to 2005. He was an important mentor of the Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who specialized in distorted, emotional representational art.
Born in Hawaii, Yoshida returned there after 2005 when his health began to fail. He studied at the University of Hawaii, but was drafted into the army during the Korean War. Yoshida resumed his studies in Chicago, and received degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Syracuse University.
Yoshida's paintings are strongly influenced by comics and his personal collection of folk art and found objects. His collages are strongly graphic, placing "tiny, oddly shaped details of architecture, fabric, hairdos and other unidentifiable elements" in ordered rows of fragments and tiers . Critic Ken Johnson called his collages "formally captivating, dreamily strange and comically absurd." Both he and his work are referred to as enigmatic, mysterious, and witty.
As a professor, Yoshida was an influential mentor to a great number of artists, including Jimmy Wright, and many of the Chicago Imagists, Barbara Grad, Paul Lamantia, and David Sharpe.
Wikidata identifier
Q3157072
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Accessed April 18, 2024.
Introduction
He is considered an example of Chicago Imagism or the Chicago School, and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago from the mid-1950s until the early 2000s.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, collagist, painter, teacher
ULAN identifier
500016363
Names
Ray Yoshida, Ray Kakuo Yoshida, Raymond Kakuo Yoshida
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 18, 2024.
