Ray Yoshida

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.

[1] His collages are strongly graphic, placing "tiny, oddly shaped details of architecture, fabric, hairdos and other unidentifiable elements"[3] in ordered rows of fragments and tiers .

[4] 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.

Yoshida returned to comic collage pieces in the 1990s and early 2000s, and produced a series of oil paintings in his late years.

[4] After his death, a retrospective exhibition was held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Sullivan Galleries ("Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and His Spheres of Influence", which ran from Nov. 13, 2010 - Feb. 12, 2011).