Isarnu Guy Conners’ North Avenue Beach is a small painting of the Chicago waterfront. It’s composed of tactile blobs of colors that resolve themselves into swimmers, bicyclists, clouds, rocks and the Chicago skyline off in the distance. The influence of artists like Van Gogh and the Impressionists is obvious, though Conners was born in Japan, and looking at the painting reminds us that the Impressionists were powerfully influenced by the colors and carefully casual compositions of Japanese prints.
North Avenue Beach is almost arbitrarily cropped—one bicyclist looks like they’ve just ridden out of the edge of the picture—in a way that modern art has naturalized but that would once have seemed amateurish. This is appropriate since Conners is, in some sense, an amateur; he’s not art school trained, and the canvas was created under the auspices of Arts of Life, a creative community for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
North Avenue Beach is on display as part of “Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-Taught Art in Chicago,” an exhibition at the newly reopened Intuit Art Museum. Artists like Henry Darger, artists/collectors like Roger Brown, and institutions like Intuit itself have made Chicago a center for the study of and cultivation of outsider or self-taught art. Chicago, as a transportation hub, has also been a major destination for immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Asia, the American South and more.
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The twenty-two artists in the exhibition are marginalized or outside the mainstream in (at least) two ways—they are immigrants or migrants, and they have not come to art through the traditional forms of training or schooling. Immigrants and self-taught artists, though, are also central to Chicago’s sense of itself as a community. The margins and the mainstream become each other, just as Conners’ daubs of paint turn into Chicago itself.
“Catalyst” is, inevitably, in part about the experience of marginality, displacement and in some cases trauma. Intuit Art Museum chief curator and co-curator of the who, Alison Amick, told Observer that she did not believe that immigrants were more likely to be self-taught artists than non-immigrants—but co-curator Dana Boutin notes that for each immigrant artist, “what was happening during their life certainly influenced their path in different ways.”
You can see this, for example, in the work of Betty Zakolan (1908-1978). Her parents were killed in the Armenian genocide, and, at seven years old, she was separated from her siblings as they tried to escape. After living in an orphanage in Greece, she came to Chicago in an arranged marriage with a grocery store owner. She had no formal training and only began painting in her 50s, encouraged by family members.
Paintings like Lost Journey and Night Journey evoke the art of, and the view of, children. Zakolan records her flight as a young girl in canvases of flattened perspective and amorphous shapes; the experiences seem too close and too intense to organize or regulate. They are journeys to nowhere and everywhere. The self-taught approach adds to the feeling that the memories have overwhelmed or broken out of the technique that attempts to contain them.
Zakolan’s art speaks powerfully to the trauma of, and the limited opportunities that resulted from, her experiences of violence, displacement and exile. At the same time, though, her paintings resonate with expressionist work by modernists like Paul Klee or Kandinsky, who were influenced by the art of children and the mentally ill. Self-taught art is, in some sense, marginal to the art tradition. But at the same time, marginality is mainstream and accepted as part of what we think of as canonical or great art. Zakolan’s journey takes place over there, but it also ends in a place we recognize.
That’s a metaphor for immigration and migration as well, and the contradiction of the margins ultimately occupying a collective center, or of a collective center composed of margins, is visible throughout the exhibition.
Korean-born artist Thomas Kong (1950-2023), for example, owned a convenience store in Rogers Park, which also became a venue for his art collaged from paper, cardboard and food packaging. The pieces are semi-abstract and angular, with RC Cola logos or images of cookies stuck on incongruously. The images are often adorned with his signature slogan, “Be Happy.”
Kong’s work feels like a de-ironized Pop Art and/or like Pop Art, which suggests that Andy Warhol was maybe less ironic than we’re used to assuming. The outsider’s skeptical, sophisticated and distanced view of kitsch Americana and the insider’s straightforward appreciation of kitsch Americana become virtually inseparable and indistinguishable, not least when the gallery reproduces some shelves from Kong’s store, complete with schlock food and drinks. The riot of trashy shapes and colors that inspired Kong’s art becomes a kind of art in itself; the despised and the discardable are imbued with joy and soul.
Mexican-born artist Alfonso “Piloto” Nieves Ruiz (1976-) offers a more critical take on American junk culture. His striking sculpture En Nombre del Progreso (In the Name of Progress) is a twisted parody of the Statue of Liberty, covered with chains, mottled branches and severed hands attached to its chest. Around the bottom of the statue is a range of garbage—crushed water bottles, a disposable camera, snack bags and a Dunkin Donuts cup.
The piece, Ruiz writes, is about the ugly results of an ideology of progress. But it’s also about his own journey and his own relationship to Mexico and to America. He says that as he worked at a brutal, demeaning job for $5/hour, “My heart was screaming at me that it was time to return home, to return to my roots. I realized that since I was a child, I had always made art. I started digging through the garbage made up of the ideas imposed by society until I found my roots, which I turned into wings to return home.”
Ruiz defaces the icon that is the primary symbol of the United States’ (often betrayed) promise to immigrants. To some degree, that’s a rejection of the U.S. But it’s also a way to claim it, and to make it part of Ruiz’s roots. Art criticizing America using the imagery of the Statue of Liberty—in editorial cartoons, for example—is very much an American tradition in itself. Ruiz explores his past through distancing himself from the U.S. (and from one of its great mainstream art sculptures) and by identifying with the U.S. at one and the same time. El Nombre de Progreso winds around American identity and American art in a stranglehold that also functions as an embrace.
There’s a similar feeling of push and pull in another work that seems to nod to the Statue of Liberty, Dr. Charles Smith’s Underground Railroad. Smith was born in New Orleans in 1940 and came to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, fleeing anti-Black violence in the South.
The concrete statue is simple and elegant, especially compared to Ruiz’s deliberately congested collage; Underground Railroad shows a Black figure standing, holding a bowl in one hand and a light raised in the other.
The light references those used by people who had escaped from slavery to signal to each other when movement was safe. It also recalls the Statue of Liberty, though, and draws a parallel between immigrants from overseas and internal migrants. In doing so, it simultaneously claims the experience of being un-American and American, of being outside and inside.
“Chicago is a city of immigrants,” Amick told Observer, “but also a city with a deep appreciation of the work of self-taught artists.” It’s a vision of identity in which people and ideas usually thought to be on the margins are a core part of what makes us into ourselves. “Catalyst” is a show about how the city and our country, in ugly ways but also in beautiful ones, are defined by what they exclude.
“Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-Taught Art in Chicago” is at Intuit Art Museum through January 11, 2026.
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