Leo Segedin
[21][22][3] Born in Chicago's West Side on March 22, 1927, Segedin showed an early aptitude for drawing that was encouraged with classes at the School of the Art Institute.
[25][26][10] Upon returning to Chicago, he decided to teach for a living, initially at a high school, before settling at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), where he served until retiring as Art Professor Emeritus in 1987, in order to paint full-time.
[23][31] His painting Hey Kid (1988) inspired Michael Smith's song of the same title, as well as Segedin's inclusion as a character alongside legendary artists, in the painting-inspired folk revue, Hello Dali: From the Sublime to the Surreal (1998).
[36] Segedin was a humanist representational painter, depicting life amid Chicago's storied elevated ("L") trains, brick storefronts, schoolyards, alleyways and cobblestone streets, often glimpsed from two-flat back porches and transit platforms.
"[26] Segedin was influenced by the 1930s legacy of social commitment and commentary—artists such as Ben Shahn, Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine—and German expressionists like George Grosz and Otto Dix.
His style ranged from realistic to expressionist, as in Sax Man (1952), which featured rich, jewel-toned color, gestural brushwork, and an elongated figure with a convincing likeness.
[47][26] Curators and critics described them as humanist "inner and outer landscapes,"[16] "beautiful, lurid, and frightful,"[1] and disturbing canvasses whose "searing colors and eerie, decadent light pit order against organism.
"[48] In the 1980s, Segedin returned to the cityscapes of his early life and work, in paintings and drawings of Chicago building facades, interiors, "L" platforms, and rush-hour crowds.
[18][49] By 1987, he began to focus on single or paired figures—often youthful self-portraits—exploring coming-of-age themes, such as play and fantasy (Pilots, 1989[50] or the later "Games" series, 2015–6, see right) or peril (Hey Kid I and II, 1988 and 1989).
[37] Alan Artner described these works of "magic realism" as meticulously rendered and naturalistic, with an intensity of mood and color, whose "force comes from a strangeness based on past time and its modes of life.
[54][38][24] In 1957, Segedin, along with twenty-three other artists—eventually including Morris Barazani, Fred Berger, Eve Garrison, Lucille Leighton, Tristan Meinecke, Dolores Nelson, Victor Perlmutter, Frank Peterson, and Joan Taxay-Weinger—co-founded Exhibit A, the first post-war, artist-run cooperative gallery in Chicago.
[56] Exhibit A attracted notice in the local press, due to the unprecedented nature of the undertaking—artists taking over the operation and business management of a gallery—and the quality and diversity of the work.
[24] After a stint teaching high school, he was hired in 1955 to start and head the art department at a branch of Chicago Teachers College that later became Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU).
