BODIES: Ray Yoshida, Christina Ramberg, Deborah Druick

Ray Yoshida was raised in Hawaii and relocated to Chicago, where he became an enormously important figure in the city’s art scene. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he was possibly influenced by Jean Dubuffet’s famous lecture at The Arts Club of Chicago in 1951 where Dubuffet coined the term “Art Brut.” Yoshida went on to teach at the SAIC, where he nurtured emerging talents like Ramberg and her peers. Artists like Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson were friends of Yoshida and likely influenced his work as he influenced theirs. He was a rare teacher; one whose person and art affected young artists around him, and who, in turn, sought to learn from his students, much like Joseph Beuys was famously known to do in Düsseldorf or John Baldessari in California.

Yoshida championed a multitude of source materials, such as pop culture, Eastern art, and self-taught art. His Pop looked different from New York Pop Art; it infused elements of Surrealism and Eastern art with the archetypal symbols of Pop art like the language of advertising. He recognized the power of seemingly insignificant artifacts and sought to share their ability to represent the visual and spiritual lineage of the human story. His rejection of high and low art distinctions and embrace of formal innovation characterizes his work and the way he taught. 

Deborah Druick studied at the Montreal School of Design. In 2020, she was one of sixty artists chosen to be featured in the issue of “New American Paintings” curated by Jerry Saltz. Druick lives and works in New York.

Druick brings a unique dimension to this cross-generational study of the human body. In her work, she addresses gender, self-identification, and female objectification. Through remarkably refined imagery painted with matte acrylic, she explores codes of femininity while also addressing issues of willingness and consent. The anonymity of her women, coupled with the almost-fetishized use of clothing, places Druick in the lineage of feminist art, as both she and Ramberg draw attention to the production of femininity and the power of the female body. While at times Ramberg and Yoshida’s work appear almost interchangeable, Druick’s work is clearly her own world. Yet, like Yoshida, Druick draws from Eastern sources; like Ramberg, she sources from early twentieth-century design.

A significant inspiration for Druick was her decade living in Hong Kong. The experience of living in Asia shifted her art away from the Western view of the woman; she rejects the often-hypersexualized Western stereotype in favor of her characteristic faceless woman. Chinese cultural propaganda images and Japanese Manga have also affected her work, as have street-style fashion and graffiti.