The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold - A Talk by Greg Foster-Rice

On Sunday, February 26, 2017 at 4:30pm, Greg Foster Rice will present his research-in-progress on the artist Ralph Arnold, a photo-collage artist who was a prominent and influential member of the Chicago art scene during the 1960s-1980s, but who is less well-knwown to audiences today. Arnold's vivid, mural-szied collages juxtapose mass media imagery with abstract painterly gestures to commen on contemporaneous social and political issues related to the artist's experience as a black, gay, Korean War veteran living in Chicago. They raise significant issues about the use of photography in the mass media by re-appropriating those images and putting them in the service of Arnold's progressive ideas about identity politics.

The final result of Foster-Rice's research will be a book and exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in the fall of 2018 as part of the city-wide Art Design Chicago iniative, organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art.