The Contemporary Museum (TCM) at First Hawaiian Center will present a memorial tribute to the Kauai-born artist Ray Yoshida (b. 1930-2009), who passed away in Honolulu in January 2009. Ray Yoshida will be on view March 12 through June 18, 2010. Admission is free during normal banking hours. The exhibition is organized and curated by James Jensen, TCM’s Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Collections.

Known for his mysteriously comical, semi-abstract paintings and collages and four decades of teaching art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yoshida is credited with influencing generations of prominent artists. He was among the most admired contributors to a tradition known as Chicago Imagism or the Chicago School—the post-war tradition of fantasy-based art making that emerged in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Among his students were Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, and Christina Ramberg, all of whom went on to have noteworthy careers themselves.

Yoshida’s first mature work was a series of luminous, jigsaw puzzle-like collages consisting of small images and fragments of images clipped from comic books and strip arranged in neat rows or grids on sheets of paper. In the 1970s, he switched to painting, and later returned to making comic-image collages as well in the early 1990s. In his paintings, Yoshida created enigmatic, cartoonish images of weirdly stylized figures in rooms, on stages, and in landscapes. His meticulously and beautifully rendered paintings brought figuration close to pattern-making and abstraction. He was influenced by folk and outsider art, of which he was an ardent collector, and his work was sometimes described as quirky, funky, and idiosyncratic.

His last solo exhibition was in 1999 at Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York City. He regularly exhibited at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and once, in 1981, at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and also at the Fleisher Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia. In 1998, TCM organized a survey exhibition that traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center in Illinois and the Madison Art Center (now the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art) in Wisconsin.

He was credited as being a force of cohesion among, as well as an early supporter of Chicago artists during his career there. His students described him as “taskmaster,” “enigmatic,” and “mysterious.” His classroom critiques were often delivered in a cryptic way and with a light, even-handed irony, according to one of his students, artist Laurie Fendrich.

Yoshida’s father was a Japanese immigrant to Hawaii and ran a market in Kapaa. Yoshida attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa from 1948 to 1950, but interrupted his schooling to serve in the United States Army during the Korean War. After being posted in Japan and later discharged, he joined one of his six sisters in Chicago, where she was a nursing student. He later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953. Five years later, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University. In 1959, he began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he remained on the faculty into the early 2000s. His first solo exhibition was in 1960 at the Middle Hall Gallery in Rockford, Illinois.

Yoshida’s artworks are in several public collections in Hawaii, including The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. His works are also in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, and the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, Austria.

Ray Yoshida once said he considered his canvases “the visual gathering place of my fragmented self.”

The exhibition at The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center will comprise works from public and private collections in Hawaii, as well as many works from the artist’s estate, many of which have not been exhibited previously.