EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 143
RAY YOSHIDA
David Nolan
Born in Kapaa, Hawaii, to Japanese parents, Ray Yoshida
(1930-2009) was aninluential teacher at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, where he was a faculty member from
1959 until 2003. Believing that artists should be educated in
the history of art from all cultures, Yoshida urged his students
to examine the ethnographic collections of the Field Museumof Natural History in Chicago as closely as the Western easel
tradition showcased in the galleries of the Art Institute, and also
to consider contemporary vernacular art forms. An expansive
visual knowledge, he insisted, would best equip young artists to
successfully articulate their personal visions and styles.
Unfortunately, Yoshida’s reputation as an educator has
longovershadowed his artwork. While a rear gallery in this
exhibition at David Nolan explored his pedagogical legacy—
juxtaposing several of his drawings with works by Art Institute
alumni Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt and Christina Ramberg, each of
whom developed a distinct visual world under his guidance—
the main gallery foregrounded Yoshida’s own collages, drawings
and paintings, focusing on an exceptionally fertile period in his
career, the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Yoshida began exhibiting richly patterned, painterly abstractions
of tropical plant forms in the 1950s, but hisirst critical recognition
came with his “Comic Book Specimen” collages, which he began in
the late 1960s and resumed in the 1990s. An avid collector of comic
books, he established typologies of architectural details, clothing,
hand gestures and speech bubbles, isolating examples of each and
arranging them on blank pages like natural history specimens.
Untitled (Sí), 1993, follows this typical format, while two untitled
collages (both ca. 1969) show Yoshida trying a diferent approach, in
which he used his “specimens” as building blocks for strange hybridget very close to observe their details. Collectively, the minia-
tures ofer up something like a biography comprised of concise
glimpses and memories, much like Brainard’s book-length poem
I Remember(1975).
A selection of Brainard’s mixed-medium collages from the
’60s and ’70s hung on the walls, their sizes ranging from just
larger than the miniatures to 20½ by 15 inches.hree works from
1975 titled “Bathroom Nudes”each show a young man in the
shower,with the curtain drawn back.he images recall the sedate
interior scenes painted by Fairield Porter, while their bathroom
settings have a graphic look that attests to Brainard’s interest in
comic strips (he created over 100 pieces based on the “Nancy”
series, for instance) as well as in comic-inspired Pop art, evoking,
in particular, Lichenstein’s work. (Another reference to Lichten-
stein in the show came by way of the small collageUntitled [Pop
Art], ca. 1975, which depicts a cartoonlike exploding stick of
dynamite.) Other pieces were both erotic and humorous.Untitled
(Heinz), 1977, for instance, consists of a close-up black-and-
white image of an erect penis (presumably an image Xeroxed
from a porn magazine) with cutout images of a pickle and a pear
in place of the genitals.
In the 1966 collageMadonna with Flowers IV(the largest work
on view), an image of the Virgin Mary with child is decorated with a
white bow and surrounded by lowers of various colors and types and
by areas of hand-drawn iligree. Made just three years after Brainard
settled on the Lower East Side, this work is lush and optimistic,
perhaps the expression of a young gay man coming into his own
and celebrating his growing artistic voice. In a collage from 1978,
Untitled (Male Torso in Glass Cloche), Brainard shows a loincloth-clad
male igure enclosed under a glass dome, placing his idealized subject
on view while also keeping it protected.Indeed, by then he had
become a master steward of beautiful things.
—Eric Sutphin
Ray Yoshida:
Untitled, ca. 1972,
felt-tipped colored
penonpaper,11by
8½ inches; at David
Nolan.Joe Brainard:
Untitled (Heinz),
1977, mixed-medium
collage,7by5
inches; at Tibor de
Nagy.