CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHER ART SHAY PRESENTS
A SELECTION OF NELSON ALGREN PHOTOGRAPHS IN ASSOCIATION WITH LOOKINGGLASS THEATRE COMPANY'S
NELSON ALGREN: FOR KEEPS AND A SINGLE DAY
Special MCA exhibition will feature images
of Nelson Algren taken by Shay throughout Chicago
Chicago, IL— The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents an exhibition featuring work by famed photographer Art Shay. This special exhibit, opening May 19, 2008, and running through June 29 at the MCA, 220 E. Chicago Ave, is presented in conjunction with Lookingglass Theatre Company's presentation of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day.
The exhibition features 19 Shay photographs of Chicago between 1949 and 1968, from the collection of the Stephen Daiter Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is
a collection hand-picked by the artist, revealing a deep friendship and
collaboration with his subject, the author Nelson Algren. Together they
capture the culture of the post-war underclass.
Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Day, produced by Lookingglass in association with the MCA, uses selections from Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and The Last Carousel. Photos of Nelson Algren by Art Shay are included in the Lookingglass production.
One
of Chicago's most prolific photographers, Art Shay has published more
than 25,000 photographs during his career, which spans more than half a
century and covers such subjects as John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential
campaign, the fights of Muhammad Ali, Hugh Hefner's infamous bedroom
office, the last man alive to have seen Abraham Lincoln's corpse,
Chicago police clubbing demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention
in Chicago, and a swan snubbing a pig as they swim.
Some of his favorite photographs, however, are those of Chicago writer Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm
and winner of the first National Book Award. Shay and Algren met in
1949 when Shay pitched a story on "the prose poet of the Chicago slums"
to his editors at Life
magazine. The two men became close friends and spent time roaming the
West Side, encountering addicts, hookers, alcoholics, bums, cops, and
hustlers, among many other street characters. The gritty photo essay
was never published, but photographs from the series are alive in many
books and currently held in important private and public collections. Both passionate about and critical of Chicago, Algren wrote a novel, Never Come Morning, depicting the seedy underbelly of crime and poverty in the city, which was banned by the Chicago Public Library System. After Algren's death in 1981, Shay published Nelson Algren's Chicago, a collection of his photographs from the men's years together as well as accompanying texts. Shay is currently writing Waiting for Nelson, a play depicting the real-life love triangle between Algren, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. His World War II play, Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart, was produced by American Theater Company three years ago.
Art Shay will attend the opening performance of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day on June 8, 2008 at The Museum of Contemporary Art. Shay's book Chicago's Nelson Algren (2007) will be on sale during performances of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day. His book Chicago Accent (Daiter, 2007), as well as the book he published in 1981, Nelson Algren's Chicago, will be on sale at the Museum of Contemporary Art bookstore.
Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day, an intimate multimedia portrait, sets Algren's backstreet poetry to the pulse of a live, on-stage jazz combo, featuring Kevin O'Donnell and Bob Lovecchio playing original music by David Pavkovic, performed against a backdrop of the city as shown through the film imagery of Ensemble Member and Director John Musial. Ensemble Member Thomas J. Cox reprises his role as Algren, one of Chicago's most enduring literary figures.
Nelson Algren
(1909-1981), American novelist, poet, essayist and short story writer,
was an unparalleled chronicler of Chicago's beauties and brutalities,
its energies and excesses. Born in Detroit in 1909,
raised first on the South Side and then on the North Side, Algren came
of age in 1931, when he found that his journalism degree from the
University of Illinois wasn't much use in the midst of the Great
Depression. His debut novel, Somebody in Boots (1935) was followed by Never Come Morning
(1942), the novel where he found his true voice and subject matter: the
lives and crimes of the Polish-American neighborhood of Chicago's Near
Northwest Side. He won the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm, and in 1951, published his lyric love poem-history lesson, Chicago: City on the Make (1951). His close friend Studs Terkel wrote the introduction for its reissue in 1987, and an Annotated Edition was published in 2001.
His
transatlantic affair with French existentialist philosopher and
novelist Simone de Beauvoir was one of the 20th Century's great love
stories. In the mid-1970s, he moved first to Paterson New
Jersey, then to Sag Harbor, New York, where his career was on an
upswing when he died of a heart attack just after his election to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other books include the short story collection The Neon Wilderness (1947), A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), Who Lost An American? (1963), Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965), The Last Carousel, (1973), and the posthumously published unfinished novel, The Devil's Stocking (1983).
Tickets
Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day runs at the MCA June 4-29, 2008. The press opening is on Sunday, June 8, 2008, at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets to Nelson Algren, $25-$55 or $20-$55 for MCA Members, are available through the Lookingglass box office at (312) 337-0665 or lookingglasstheatre.org or at the MCA box office at (312) 397-4010 or www.mcachicago.org.
I would like to find the Art Shay photo of Janice Kingslow with Nelson Algren sitting in a cafe.
Posted by: Millie Barnet | November 17, 2008 at 07:35 PM
I am very interested, also, in the Art Shay photo of Janice Kingslow with Nelson Algren sitting in a cafe.
Posted by: Celeste Kingslow Fritz, April 26, 2009
Posted by: Celeste Kingslow Fritz | April 25, 2009 at 10:40 PM
Celeste Kingslow Fritz,
Do you happen to be related to the Kingslow family in North Jersey. My great grandmother was a Kingslow.
I can be reached at Purrr8@aol.com
Posted by: Doris | May 12, 2009 at 07:10 PM