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Art Shay "Thru Colors"
March 11th, 2010 Legendary Art Shay, in living color
Your assignment? Go to Thomas Masters Gallery. It doesn't matter what you already have on your social calendar for the next two weeks. Make some time, and then give yourself more time than you think you need. You're going to want to stay awhile.
Masters' current show, "Art Shay's True Colors," has been in the works for a while. Initially there were 50 or so photographs planned to be included in this, the famed local photojournalist's first-ever all-color exhibition.
The final tally? Ninety photographs. And even then, we're barely scratching the surface of Shay's career.
Most of those included in "True Colors" are plucked from the late-1950s to the '70s, when Shay was freelancing for every American publication worth reading: Life (where he'd previously been a bureau chief), Time, Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times Magazine and a slew of others. Just how many photographs was Shay producing during that time? Enough that about 1,000 of them were good enough to land on magazine covers.
There are candid portraits here of Nelson Algren, Oprah Winfrey and Johnny Cash. There are more journalistic photos taken after dark in Memphis on April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when Shay and his reporter were following police as they were searching for King's killer. Those, and the ones taken days later of King lying in state, will give you chills.
There are pictures here of Jimmy Hoffa behind the bars of the Lewisburg, Pa., penitentiary. There's a candid snapshot of artist Robert Crumb and his wife, goofing off in Shay's Deerfield living room. There's a dolled-up Dolly Parton singing to fans in Kokomo, Ind., in 1976, and from the same year, a series of pictures of a shy-looking Andy Warhol greeting guests at a reception in his honor.
There's a particularly striking photo of a campaigning John F. Kennedy, shot from below, the white Ohio sky behind him. The caption (Shay wrote all of them for this exhibit, in touching and often comical detail): "It was almost impossible to shoot a bad picture of JFK."
Or, more accurately, it's almost impossible for Shay to shoot a bad picture.
"Art Shay's True Colors" at Thomas Masters Gallery, 245 W. North Ave., 312-440-2322; thomasmastersgallery.com; through Feb. 25 |
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