Artists Associated with Chicago

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On the Death of My Father

Shelly Terman Canton

Date: 1968

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Mr. Irving D. Canton

Object number: C1990.1

Text Entries: Shelly Canton 1930/1987 [sic]: Drawings and Prints. (exh. cat., Fairweather Hardin Gallery). Chicago, Illinois: Fairweather Hardin Gallery, 1987. [This impression no. 8/25 illustrated on page accompanying the conclusion of the catalogue's biography of the artist]

Mother and Child

Shelly Terman Canton

Date: 1964

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Mrs. Joyce Turner Hilkevitch in memory of Jonathan B. Turner

Object number: C1991.7

Text Entries: Shelly Terman Canton grew up in Lakeview, Illinois, daughter of a Chicago businessman and a concert pianist. At the age of eighteen she left Iowa State University to begin a career as a printmaker and draughtsman in New York, where she greatly admired the socially critical work of painter, graphic artist and photographer Ben Shahn. Canton's own art was directly informed by her awareness of hardship and injustice; the prominently gnarled hands, jagged linearity and somber mood of Mother and Child are particularly reminiscent of twentieth-century German artist Kathe Kollwitz's stark, black and white images of mothers. Canton's poetry likewise expresses her conception of the artist's task as, at least partly, an empathetic one: My arms reach out like tentacles Feeling every pulse, experiencing every pain Some child's cry wakes me and I can't sleep I hear the whole world whispering in my ear.

Bleecker Street Fire Hydrant

Kyra Markham

Date: 1942

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1995.43

Text Entries: Witkin, Lee D. Kyra Markham, American Fantasist (1891–1967). (exh. cat., The Witkin Gallery, Inc.). New York: The Witkin Gallery, Inc., 1981. Ill. p. 7 (black & white). Master Prints of Five Centuries, The Alan and Marianne Schwartz Collection. (exh. cat., The Detroit Institute of Arts). Detroit, Michigan: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1990. No. 73, p. 94.

Night Club

Kyra Markham

Date: 1935

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1996.74

Text Entries: Witkin, Lee D. Kyra Markham, American Fantasist (1891–1967). (exh. cat., The Witkin Gallery Inc.). New York: The Witkin Gallery Inc., 1981. Text p. 4; ill. p. 5 (black & white).

Topcat Boy

Ed Paschke

Date: 1970

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund

Object number: 2017.3

Text Entries: An early large-scale masterwork, Top Cat Boy bears all the trademark features of Paschke's paintings of the 1970s: vivid colors, application of a variety of media, and subject matter drawn from his fascination and flirtation with life on the social fringe. Top Cat Boy demonstrates Paschke’s delicate approximation of media including photomechanical imagery, silkscreen, and airbrush, while the nearly neon palette is typical of his work from this period. The artist utilized overhead projectors to layer images onto his canvas, which introduced a sophisticated visual and psychological complexity. With its carnivalesque arrangement of colors and narrative ambiguity, the painting, like most of Paschke's greatest works, exists in its own sleazy netherworld, where the fluidity of the figures' racial and gendered identities play out against a neon-lit backdrop of spectacular entertainment and, perhaps, social deviance. An earlier variation on the two figures, a photo-realistic painting titled A Colores (1970; location unknown) appears to merge a postcard-like image on the left and two overlapping advertising photographs on the right. In this version, the male figure from Top Cat Boy appears without a mask while the female appears in her original guise as a doll. A photograph of Top Cat Boy in an interim state reveals that Paschke painted the man's face in full prior to painting the mask over it. Top Cat Boy retains the doll-like female form, but replaces the doll's face with a photomechanical image of a woman's face. She stares blankly into the distance, diverting the gazes of onlookers and expressing a detached ennui that contrasts sharply with the man's knowing smile. In its subject, Top Cat Boy is a transitional image linking the boxers and wrestlers Paschke painted in 1968–69 and the strippers that would populate his paintings throughout the 1970s. The mask worn by wrestlers in such paintings as Mid American (1969; The Art Institute of Chicago) or Red Ball (1971; private collection) reappears in Top Cat Boy. The man’s oversized hockey gloves, too, recall the wrestlers' hulking forms, yet they also look robotically futuristic. In the fall of 1970, Paschke likely exhibited Top Cat Boy as part of a one-man show that also included paintings of shoes and other leather objects at Chicago's Deson-Zaks Gallery. By then, Paschke had already begun exhibiting with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, whose work was rooted in personal experience but articulated in a syntax drawn from the garish propensities of lowbrow popular culture. As such, Top Cat Boy is an amalgamation of Paschke’s lifelong penchant for sports like wrestling, and for the gritty aspects of urban life.