Ray Yoshida was a talented painter & collage artist, as well as an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a mentor to representational artists known as the Chicago Imagists of the 1960′s and 70′s (specifically The Hairy Who), who specialized in distorted, emotionally representational artwork.

collage by Ray Yoshida

collage by Ray Yoshida

Ray‘s artwork was strongly influenced by comic strips & comic books, as well as his own collection of folk art and found art. Ken Johnson, art critic for The New York Times, describes Ray Yoshida‘s collages as being created from “tiny, oddly shaped details of architecture, fabric, hairdos and other unidentifiable elements,” and went on to say that the works were “formally captivating, dreamily strange and comically absurd.”

collage by Ray Yoshida

(detail)

Ray Yoshida was born in Kauai, Hawaii in 1930 and, after spending much of his life in Chicago, returned to the islands in 2005 when his health began to fail. He remained there until his passing in early January of 2009, at the age of 78.

collage by Ray Yoshida

Ray Yoshida in his studio

Yoshida‘s enigmatic & witty works of collage art have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago & New York, and the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. Ray Yoshida‘s works have been exhibited in retrospectives at The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Madison Art Center in Madison, Wisconsin. His work is also in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

collage by Ray Yoshida

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