Art Shay

Charles Percy, 1919 - 2011, RIP

In his column for Chicagoist, Art Shay recently posted some memories of Senator Charles Percy, a Republican who represented Illinois in the United States senator from 1967 to 1985. This Art Shay montage shows Percy with Ronald Reagan and in the smaller image Chaim Weizmann with the young Sargent Shriver. 

An excerpt from Shay on Percy:

Senator Chuck Percy (shown shaking the fake Gipper's hand), was an athlete, an ardent Christian Scientist like his mother, the father of four talented children. I started taking their Christmas card pictures in the fifties, when Chuck became head of Bell & Howell, mostly a camera company. I did his first Fortune magazine portraits and got to do annual reports for the company. When B&H scored the Canon distribution account, he gave me an early model of the fastest lens in the world, the Canon .095. (You saw some of its work on my recent essay of Elizabeth Taylor in the near-darkness of the Pump Room. When I was going to Africa in 1955 to make eight Zoo Parade movies for Lincoln Park zoomeister Marlin Perkins, he gave me his company's new seven-frames-a-second camera to test in the shadow of Hemingway's Kilimanjaro to shoot giraffe and zebra catching with the best licensed animal supplier for zoos, the 75 year old Afrikaan, Willi de Beer.)

When Eisenhower announced he was going to run for President, he called Percy and his family and apologized for taking the stage that Percy and many GOP wigs had thought would naturally be Percy's next step."

Ike had never heard of The Federalist Papers," said, "so I tutored him."

Years later, Lauren Shay, one of three Shay children who became photographers, took this photo of Percy with a new Republican Senator from Illinois, Peter Fitzgerald.

 

 

Art Shay Reception -- You Are Invited

The Stephen Daiter Gallery has scheduled the opening reception for the Art Shay photo exhibit. Save the date: Friday, Jan. 6, from 5 to 8 PM. Meet the artist and view the show: "Art Shay and the Documenting of Mid-Century America."

The exhibit will be on display from Jan. 6 through Feb. 25.

Click on the link to view a PDF of the announcement: Art Shay exhibit invitation.

If you make it to the reception, ask Art Shay about his mentor, Francis Miller, who taught Shay to always "keep shootin' whatever else was happenin" and to always speak well of associates who might put in a good or bad word about you to the boss.

More of Shay on Miller in the Chicagoist: From the Vault of Art Shay: My Guru.

 

 

 

Art Shay Exhibit At Daiter Gallery in 2012

The Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago has just announced a 2012 exhibit of Art Shay photography. From Jan. 6 through late February the gallery will display a photography show largely based on Shay's career.

Eighty percent of it will be a full retrospective of Art Shay's wide-ranging photojournalism for the magazines of his day, some of his 1,100  covers and irreverent pictures of celebrities and the news events of his time, plus many previously unexhibited pictures by Shay, whom the gallery has represented for 35 years.

The other 20 percent will include work by other masters of the past century -- namely Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whose candid images of their time have often been compared to Shay's.