Touch and Go Ray Yoshida and His Spheres of Influence

Ray Yoshida (1930-2009) taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 40 years, where, with his students--among them, Jim Nutt, Philip Hanson and Christina Ramberg--he fostered a scene of artists that would become known as the Chicago Imagists. Touch and Go is the first book to comprehensively examine Yoshida's work in relation to his life in an educational institution, both as a student and a teacher. The Chicago arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s is explored here as a community of mutual influence, with Yoshida as a figure of particular importance. As John Corbett writes in his essay: "He was influential. He was influenced. He was part of the nuanced series of relays that has produced the unique art scene in Chicago, open to input from elsewhere, but in many ways a world quite hermetic and almost perversely eccentric."