Jan Tichy
Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Associate Professor at the Department of Photography and the Department of Art & Technology Studies. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Chicago Cultural Center among others. His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York and Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. In 2011, he created Project Cabrini Green, a community based art project that illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago during its month-long demolition. In 2014 Tichy started to work on a long-term, NEA supported, community project in Gary, IN – the Heat Light Water cultural platform. Beyond Streaming: a sound mural for Flint at the Broad Museum in Michigan in 2017 brought teens from Flint and Lansing to share their experience of the ongoing water crisis. In 2018 Tichy has been one of the inaugural artists for Art on theMart.
Portrait by Devina Yoestong
Stories from Jan Tichy
Kioto Aoki, Jan Tichy & Benito Juarez Community Academy
- Jose Zavala – Animate in Place
- Alonzo Ulloa – Animate in Place
- Citlaly Carranza – Animate in Place
- Elizabeth Arriaga – Animate in Place
- Marvin Lopez – Animate in Place
- Nilsy Baltazar – Animate in Place
- Karen Aragon – Animate in Place
- Zitaly Luvios – Animate in Place
- Quesalis Carranza – Animate in Place
- Sarai Arellano – Animate in Place
Project Overview
Animate in Place builds on previous years of collaboration between Benito Juarez Community Academy and CPS Lives, incorporating analogue photographic processes into creative projects, and this year introducing elements of moving image. Students from the IB digital arts course began by looking at various optical toys developed in the 19th century, which reflect humanity’s long standing fascination with suggestive movement and can be traced back to prehistoric cave paintings. Linking their photographic studies with these early moving image techniques, the students were tasked to create their own short narratives as stop motion animations from home, photographing on their smartphones to animate the space and objects around them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has reached a moment of temporary stasis, with the home as its central axis. Thus students were encouraged to think about what it means to animate this space during the shelter-in-place measures, resulting in site-specific and situationally-specific narratives.
Jan Tichy, Kioto Aoki & Benito Juarez Community Academy
Project Overview
Places Under the Sun, 2018 Cyanotype on cotton, unique quilt, 66*36 inch
Following on the history of Chicago documentary projects that CPS Lives continues, students from the nearby Benito Juarez Community Academy were asked to make a snapshot of their place in the city, capturing with their smart phones cameras the world around their neighborhood, mostly Pilsen. Stacy Ciccone, IB digital art teacher at Benito Juarez Community Academy and Jan Tichy and Kioto Aoki have worked during the spring with two classes to include photography in the existing art program, introducing analog photographical processes into their digital photography. For the occasion of Bauhaus Centennial Kioto and Jan explored with CPS students the work of Nathan Lerner, the New Bauhaus Chicago artist and designer. The artists introduced the students to the work coming from the Chicago New Bauhaus, visiting AIC and seeing the origional work. Following the visit to AIC Photograpny colelction, the students build their own Lerner’s Light Boxes to experiment with light and space. Photographing with their own smart phone cameras and developing the images as cyanotypes, the students learned about digital and analog photography. The cyanotypes prints on cotton cloth allowed for the individual works to come together as one large quilt that decorates the halls of the school along the quilt from last year. In class the students processed the digital images they captured around their neighborhood into black and white negatives and printed on transparencies that later transferred as sun prints on cyanotype cloth. The quilt that they put together from these prints is a collaborative effort that reflects on some of the perspectives they see their neighborhoods through.
