Gallery

I am a painter, printmaker and muralist, still  best known as a public artist. After undergraduate studies at Harvard University, I fled to Paris on a French Government Grant,  learned etching at S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17, and painted at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France. Paris. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,  I learned lithography with Ray Martin and Mark Pascal,  then taught at Elmhurst University for 43 years, doing public projects in the summers. 

Throughout my teaching years at Elmhurst and beyond, I have continued as a studio artist, participating in major national and international travelling shows, including the Museum of Modern Art’s “Committed to Print,” the Jewish Museum’s “Bridges and Boundaries,” Berlin’s “Kunst und Krieg,” the  “Poetic Dialogue Project,” and the American Friends Service Committee’s  “Windows and Mirrors”.  During the 1980s and 90s, I often showed in worship spaces. I have had over thirty solo shows, including five in New York City. I am represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brauer Museum of Valparaiso University, and a dozen other public collections, including, naturally, the Elmhurst University Collection. I have contributed to fifteen print portfolios, and many group exhibits.

Public art, the other half of my career, began almost simultaneously with teaching. I became deeply involved in the community mural movement, making, organizing and documenting public art embedded in local neighborhoods. 

In 1969, I led my first community mural. In 1970-71, with the late William Walker, I  co-founded the Chicago Mural Group (today named the Chicago Public Art Group). With Eva and James Cockcroft, I co-authored Toward a People’s Art (Dutton, 1977), the classic account of the early years of the contemporary mural movement, reissued in an expanded edition by University of New Mexico Press in 1998.
 

For  47 years  I  co-led mosaic and concrete relief projects as well as painted murals in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Paris, France, and Managua, Nicaragua. My collaboration with Nina Smoot Cain produced major mosaic commissions at Bethel New Life in Chicago, in Spencer, Iowa as part of America Creates for the Millennium, and for four libraries in Broward County, Florida. During summer 2010, I served as a US Cultural Envoy with La Ciudad Pinctada  to teach and create mosaic murals in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Also in 2010-11, my students and I created twelve panels of mosaic for Elmhurst University. I have led workshops and lectured in Mexico, France, Britain, and Belgium. 

My last major public commission was the Martin Luther King Living Memorial (carved brick relief columns) in Marquette Park, Chicago, with Sonja Henderson, completed in 2016. I continue to collaborate with Henderson in a supporting role. Now Emeritus, I focus on printmaking and painting in my home and studio in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. I am married with four sons and six grandchildren.