Past Perfect
Past Perfect is a limited edition print fundraiser for the Riverside Arts Center (RAC). Curated by Paul D’Amato. In 2022, RAC launched our first on-line limited edition print fundraiser entitled “The Shape of Things to Come”. It was so successful we decided to follow it up this fall - in honor of our 30th anniversary - with this portfolio entitled “Past Perfect, 30th Anniversary Portfolio”.
We invited 12 artists who have been an essential part of our exhibition programming at RAC to share an artwork for this unique 20-edition print portfolio of 20 inkjet prints.
The images are printed on 11” x 17” Canson Arches 310 gsm paper and are signed, titled, and numbered by the artists. These prints will be available online for two weeks to raise funds to support programming at RAC, the epicenter for contemporary art in the western suburbs of Chicago.
The production of these prints was made possible by the generous support of Document, Chicago's preeminent digital print facility, and by I.T. Supplies who donated the amazing paper on which they are printed.
First editions available
Portfolios include all 12 prints signed & numbered
single prints
Single prints, 11” x 17” numbered 6-20 are available. Each print is signed and editioned by the artist.
Erin Washington is a Painter, Drawer, and Installation artist currently living and working in Chicago. Using fugitive and symbolic materials (ex. ashes, blackberries, bones, chalk, moss, and spaceblankets), Washington’s works source imagery from the Sciences, Mythology, and Art History that represent ruptures and failures in the search for meaning and truth. Erin is currently a lecturer in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2011. Notable solo exhibitions have been held at such venues as The Riverside Art Center, Riverside Illinois and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago Illinois. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at such spaces as Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center; and Columbia University in New York. Washington's upcoming exhibition at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois is scheduled for October 2017.
Alice Hargrave, a photo based artist, incorporates sound, video, and photographic imagery within layered site specific installations addressing impermanence: environmental insecurity, habitat loss, and species extinctions. Recently, The Canary in the Lake, exhibition and monograph, revisualizes climate related data from lakes on all seven continents. In 2023, Hargrave was selected to create original artwork for Chicago’s esteemed public art program through the CTA.
Hargrave collaborated with The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, to create her project Last Calls, portraits of threatened birds using sound wave patterns of their vocalizations in the wild. Last Calls is widely exhibited, internationally in Lianzhou, China, and won a 2020 Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, and the 2019 finalist award. The bird call patterns are translated into “Haute Couture” garments by Dovima Paris where profits directly benefit the birds. Paradise Wavering, Hargrave’s monograph (Daylight 2016) and extensive solo exhibition traveled to multiple venues across the United States.
Hargrave is included in several permanent collections and has been awarded with Artist Residencies in The Florida Keys, Montana, Vermont, Wisconsin, and a fellowship at Ragdale. She is pursuing conservation work and climate activism through her artwork — putting the work to work is her modus operandi.
Jennifer Taylor is one of the original founders of the Riverside Arts Center and served as Vice President of RAC’s Board of Directors for its first nineteen years. Jennifer is a self-taught artist, known for her inventive narrative paintings and beautiful hand painted furniture. She is the owner of the Painted Board Studio, which originated in Riverside but is now part of her newly opened studio and gallery, Beach Art Studios, located in the Miller Beach neighborhood of Gary, Indiana. You may also be familiar with Jennifer as an actress. She’s had a long and varied career. At one point a regular on the soap opera The Edge of Night, she has recently had recurring roles in such television series as Empire and Prison Break, and played the role of Dinah in the Den Theater’s acclaimed production of The Quality of Life.
Information about Sparkle House, Beach Art Studios and Painted Board Studio can be found here:
Paul D'Amato was born in Boston where he attended Boston Latin School at the height of racial unrest and civil rights. He moved west to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country - often by hitch-hiking and freight trains - as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale he moved to Chicago where he discovered the community of Pilsen. The pictures and writing D'Amato produced there were made into the book, “Barrio" published by the University of Chicago Press. His book of images made in the African-American community on the west side of Chicago, entitled "Here/Still/Now" published by Kehrer Verlag, was awarded the Lucie Foundation Book Prize in 2018. “Rave” published by Skylark Editions in 2019, is about work made in the underground Techno scene in the early 90’s. He is now finishing work for a book entitled “Midway”.
Paul D’Amato has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy, and a number of Illinois Arts Council fellowships and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago among many others.
KELLI CONNELL BIOGRAPHY
Kelli Connell is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity and photographer / sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the J Paul Getty Museum among others. Recent publications include PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice (Aperture) and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life (DECODE Books). Connell has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and The Center for Creative Photography. Kelli Connell lives in Chicago where she teaches at Columbia College Chicago.
Michelle Wasson is an internationally exhibiting artist based in Chicago, IL. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center, Elmhurst Art Museum, Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX), Epiphany Art Center (Chicago), and Brand Library Art Center (Glendale, CA). She is the recipient of several Illinois Arts Council grants and a City of Chicago DCASE grant. Her art has been reviewed in The Chicago Tribune, Bad At Sports, Newcity, and Hyperallergic. She has served as faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2016 she co-founded the artist run exhibition space Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago. Wasson received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.
https://michellewasson.com
Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized.
Ms. Lehrer’s work has been seen in venues including the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, The Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, the United Nations, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Arnot Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Frye Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the State of Illinois Museum.
Awards include the 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship of the Ford Foundation; the Nick and Keven Wilder Award for Excellence in Teaching, SAIC; 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant; 2017 3Arts MacDowell Fellowship for writing; 2015 3Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Illinois; the 2014 Carnegie Mellon Fellowship at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges; the 2009 Prairie Fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation.
Grants include the 2009 Critical Fierceness Grant, the 2008 3Arts Foundation Grant, and the 2006 Wynn Newhouse Award for Excellence, (NYC), as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the University of Illinois, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lehrer’s memoir, Golem Girl, was published by the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House in October 2020, won the 2020 Barbellion Prize for Literature; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and shortlisted for the Chicago review of Books 2020 CHIRBY Awards.
Riva Lehrer is represented by Regal Hoffman & Associates literary agency, NYC, and by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago.
Ms. Lehrer was a longtime faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University.
Oli Watt lives and works in Chicago. He currently serves as Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Printmedia Department. Oli has shown his work nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Spencer Brownstone Gallery in NYC, the International Center of Graphic Art in Slovenia, MI, La Band Art Gallery in Los Angeles and Rocket Gallery in London. His work has been discussed in numerous publications including Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner and Village Voice. He runs free range gallery and project space in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood.
Laura Husar Garcia
My work investigates the study of wonder, hope and endurance of the human spirit during today's unprecedented global changes. I use historical photographic processes, large format, toy and digital cameras. I also create one-of-a-kind collections on varying organic materials, alongside my limited edition works on paper. My recent work reflects a life-long passion for sharing the ecstatic whispers of nature with those who need it most. I'm frequently found in the river next to my home, incorporating art as a daily practice of hope and meditation.
I was born into a family of storytellers. At age 7, I brought my camera on adventures alongside my father, who was a conservation writer. On early mornings I spun the family globe and wherever my finger landed, that was the Chicago ethnic neighborhood we explored for the day. My father wrote stories about the people we met and their connection with nature, while I made photographs with my Kodak Instamatic. My passion for visual storytelling led to a career as a photographer by way of Santa Fe and Mexico.
I've documented the intimacies of the human spirit and the fragility of nature for more than 30 years. My work has been exhibited widely, including The Barcelona Foto Biennial, The Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography in Prague, Fotofever at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France, The Polish Museum of America in Chicago, The Griffin Museum in Massachusetts, Fotofest Biennial in Houston, Photo Independent in Los Angeles, Tilt Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, among others. I am a first place winner of the International Julia Margaret Cameron Photography Award for Women, a co-winner of a 1st place Community Grant from the Illinois Humanities Council and a Photolucida Critical Mass top 200 finalist. My photographs have been published in several books, including “America At Home: A Close-up Look at How We Live”, which is one of the largest collaborative photography projects in publishing history. My work has also been published in The New York Times, National Geographic Magazine and Newsweek, Slate Magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Le Monde (France) and more.
I was a photographer in Santa Fe, NM and Mexico, where my foundation as an artist took root, before returning to Chicago where I also became a creative director and curator. I live with my husband Alex, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, our two children and a yellow lab named Blue.
Nancy is a retired pediatric occupational therapist, residing in the Miller neighborhood of Gary, Indiana, at the southern most point of Lake Michigan. Primarily a visual artist, she has harbored a secret wish to write and has done so with some urgency over the past few years. Her visual art is often inspired by the Midwest landscape surrounding Lake Michigan, and rich imagery of 19th century painters such as Whistler, Turner, Innes and, pre-impressionist France. She enjoys walking the Indiana dunes with partner, Mauro, and spending time with her beautiful children, grandchildren, beloved cats, and backyard chickens.
Tony Phillips, born in 1937 in Miami Beach, FL, was raised in Rochester, NY, before settling in Chicago, IL, in 1969 where he has been a significant presence in the art community. Phillips pursued his B.A. at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, graduating cum laude in 1960. He continued his education at Yale University's School of Art & Architecture, earning his B.F.A. in 1962 and M.F.A. in 1963. With an illustrious career spanning decades, he has been showcased in various solo and two-person exhibitions, often alongside his wife, Judith Raphael. Notable exhibitions include “The Prior Life of Tony Phillips” at Glow Gallery in Chicago (2019) and collaborations with Judith at The Freeark Gallery and Indiana University Northwest, among others.
Phillips, who also had a distinguished academic career, has been a Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, contributing significantly to the institution since 1969. He has garnered several awards and fellowships, including National Endowment for the Arts Senior Artists Fellowships in 1978 and 1985, and has had his work showcased in prominent public collections. In addition to being an acclaimed artist, Phillips has been active as a curator, visiting artist, and lecturer, further cementing his influence and legacy in the art world.
Joanne Aono is an artist, curator, and farmer. Her research-based drawings and installations address identity, immigration, and the environment. Solo exhibitions include Boundary (Chicago), Mosnart (Chicago), Geneva Center for the Arts (Geneva, Illinois), and Indiana University (2024, Gary, Indiana). She has been included in two-person and group exhibitions at Firecat Projects (Chicago), the Illinois State Museum (Chicago, Springfield, and Lockport), Terrain Biennial, and the Rockford Art Museum. Aono has received Illinois Arts Council, Artist Run Chicago HPAC, and several Chicago DCASE grants. Her art has been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, and the Huffington Post. Aono directs the alternative art project, Cultivator - Chicago Art Exhibitions & Farm Art Projects and serves as gallery director for the Riverside Arts Center. She maintains a studio at Bray Grove Farm in north central Illinois.
joanne@joanneaono.com
www.joanneaono.com
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is a limited edition print?
It is a print made by mechanical means such as etching or lithograph — and now inkjet prints — that is guaranteed to have been reproduced a limited number of times. In this case, only 20 prints have been made. They are signed and numbered by the artist from #1 to #20. And that's it — when they are gone, there are no more.
How does this fundraiser support programming at RAC?
The Riverside Arts Center (RAC) is a nonprofit arts organization providing services to the public and artists. We are a regional anchor for creative practice and learning. Home to galleries, artist studios, and a school that showcases the art of our time, RAC serves as a hub for artistic exploration and community engagement centered in downtown Riverside.
We offer creative opportunities that contribute to the health and well-being of our community and stimulate ideas and conversation around the arts. Our programs are funded partly by appeals like this one that invites people to support exhibitions, events, classes, artist studios, administration, and so on. 100% of the sale of these prints will support us as we continue serving the community through the arts.
How will I receive the prints, and will they be framed?
The prints will be shipped by USPS, typically within 5 to 7 days after purchase, and will not be framed. Framing is always a personal choice and, as such, is up to the buyer. Prints can also be picked up directly from the RAC when it is open. Visit our website for the address and hours. www.riversideartscenter.com
RAC's MISSION:
The Riverside Arts Center strives to be the epicenter for contemporary art in the near-west suburbs of Chicago. Through exhibitions, education, artist studios, and public events, the RAC is an advocate for the vital role the arts play in nurturing community and amplifying diverse experiences, ideas, and backgrounds.
SPONSORS
THANK YOU to our project sponsors! Document and IT Supplies
