Raymond "Ray" Kakuo Yoshida 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.
12 Facts About Ray Yoshida
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Ray Yoshida was an important mentor of the Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who specialized in distorted, emotional representational art.
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Ray Yoshida studied at the University of Hawaii, but was drafted into the army during the Korean War.
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Ray Yoshida resumed his studies in Chicago, and received degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Syracuse University.
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Ray Yoshida's paintings are strongly influenced by comics and his personal collection of folk art and found objects.
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Ray Yoshida's collages are strongly graphic, placing "tiny, oddly shaped details of architecture, fabric, hairdos and other unidentifiable elements" in ordered rows of fragments and tiers.
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Ray Yoshida created paintings in the early 1960s, and developed the "comic collage" in the later years of this decade.
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Ray Yoshida made paintings that incorporated elements from the comics.
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Ray Yoshida returned to comic collage pieces in the 1990s and early 2000s, and produced a series of oil paintings in his late years.
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Ray Yoshida had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Middle Hall Gallery in Rockford, Illinois.
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Ray Yoshida's work was shown along with the Imagists in the exhibition "Don Baum Sez 'Chicago Needs Famous Artists" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1969.
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The papers of Ray Yoshida are now held at the Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution.