History of Painting II., 2019
Forty 35 mm slides, slide show projection
SAIC Flaxman Library teaching slide collection
In 2014, the Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago decided to discard its collection of over one million teaching slides. I salvaged approximately 30,000 slides—the entire Painting section. This archive became the foundation for History of Painting I (2015), a large-scale installation at the Chicago Cultural Center, created in collaboration with curator and art historian Dany Shulman. Comprising over 9,000 slides arranged by color, the work transformed three monumental windows into dynamic, stained-glass-like surfaces, shifting with the changing light.
In 2016, while working with curator and art historian Amy Beste at the Block Museum on the restoration and digitization of materials by Morton Goldsholl, a student of László Moholy-Nagy, I encountered an entire body of work based on layering images within 35mm slide mounts. This approach resurfaced in 2019 when Lucie Fontaine and Nicola Trezzi invited me to reconsider the remaining thousands of slides for their exhibition Currency at Gallery Nome. As I revisited the collection, I became drawn to the patterns embedded within the archive—not only in terms of color relationships but also in the biases of representation. The overwhelming presence of European art, particularly classical European, alongside a substantial number of Chinese and Japanese works, contrasted sharply with the relative absence of American and African art.
The transparency of the slides allows these disparate images to collapse into one another – East into West, skin into foliage, city into mountain, color into color – creating new visual and historical narratives. History of Painting II comprises 40 slides, each formed by pressing two unaltered slides together within a single 35mm frame. Without cutting, coloring, or editing, the images are precisely overlaid to achieve a deliberate composition – one that speaks to the layered histories of painting itself.
Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist, educator and curator. 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 Professor at the Departments of Photography and Art & Technology/Sound Practices. 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. His large public art projects engage communities and offer platforms to share. In 2011 Project Cabrini Green illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago and 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 was one of the inaugural artists for Art on the MART. In 2019 he co-edited and curated Ascendants: the Bauhaus Handprints collected by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy published by IIT Press. His 2020 yearlong project Remote Pyramids in Dallas, TX brought together local Latinx teenagers with refugee teens to critically and creatively address issues of migration. In 2023, within the framework of Chicago Architecture Biennale, Tichy reconstructed the whitewashed mural All Of Mankind by William Walker on the façade of Joffrey Ballet Chicago. Most recently Tichy co-curated the first major retrospective of Lucia Moholy at Kunsthalle Prague and Fotostiftung Schweiz.