Foreground, from left: Billy Cogran, Florence Shay, Art Shay, at Stephen Daiter Gallery opening reception. Photo by Richard Shay.
The University of Wisconsin in Madison has scheduled Art Shay for an artist talk on Wednesday, May 2. Shay will recap highlights of his seven decades as a photographer, shooting those in the hot spotlight and others in the cold shadows.
The visiting artist talk is at 4:30 p.m. in the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison.
From the Art Shay bio on the Art Department's website:
In 2007, Shay had his first major retrospective of his black and white photographs which ran for six months at the Chicago History Museum: "The Essential Art Shay: Selected Photographs." In 2008, Shay had a solo show “Traces of a bygone America” in Paris at Gallerie Albert Loeb. Also in 2008, The Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago held an exhibit of photographs titled “Art Shay: Chicago Accent” which included pieces from between 1949 and 1968 of Shay's work while working with Algren of Chicago's "underclass."
Since the opening in 1976 of Northbrook Court Mall in Northbrook, Illinois, Shay has been chronicling life at the mall. Shay is also working on a project on the life of Smashing Pumpkin's Billy Corgan. Since the end of 2010, Shay has been writing a weekly photography blog "From the Vault of Art Shay" on Chicagoist.com.
In 2010, Chicago's Thomas Master's Gallery featured Shay's first show of exclusively his color photography "Art Shay: True Colors." The Chicago Tribune named this show as one of the best 2010 Chicago gallery shows.
A showing of Shay's black-and-white work at the Stephen Daiter gallery is on view through Feb. 25. Bill Zwecker reports in the final lines of his Sun-Times column that starts with the latest Kardashian news that sales from the gallery started quickly:
Rocker Billy Corgan was among the first to snap up a precious early Art Shay photograph — “Dorsal Nude, Simone de Beauvoir” — at the recent Daiter Gallery opening of the latest Shay exhibition.
A Deerfield review report on the Art Shay exhibit, with photos by Richard Shay of the reception, includes Shay's account of how he took that photo:
But one of his favorite on-the-job memories was photographing Simone de Beauvoir, a French existentialist philosopher and feminist, when she visited Chicago to be with noted American author Nelson Ahlgren.
“Nelson was living in a $10-a-month apartment on Wabansia and asked if I could borrow a bath tub for Simone to use, because she wanted to bathe,” Shay said.
Anyone who wants more of that story will have the opportunity in May, in Madison.
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