ART CATALOG
The Last IPA Art Show
It has been almost five years since we closed the doors on that little experiment in television we called Independent Programming Associates. But we remember fondly the people, the place and especially the art pieces that seemed to appear out of nowhere on its walls.
On Sunday, September 18, there will be a 25th Anniversary Reunion of IPA employees and clients at the Wishbone Restaurant, 1001 W. Washington Ave. in Chicago. During the reunion 26 pieces of art from IPA will be on display at the Aron Packer Gallery. At 8 PM, the whole party will adjourn down the street to the gallery where we will literally sell the art off the walls in a live auction.
The IPA art collection contains unique works by artists ranging from the unknown to the now famous. Below you will find a catalog of the art and artists along with a description of the pieces and biographical comments about the artist's relationship to IPA. If you want to see a larger image, click on the picture.
If you would like to purchase a piece in advance of the auction, you may buy it or obtain more information about it by sending an email to art@theweekbehind.com. Items not sold through The Week Behind will go up for auction with starting bids 50% lower than the list price. Proceeds from the sale will be used to pay for the party. Bid early, bid often. It's gonna be one helluva party!
LEWIS ALQUIST
Lew Alquist (1948- 2004) became IPA’s first artist-in-residence when he helped us install the electrical wiring for our first editing suite. At the time, Alquist was a pioneer in electronic visualization, combining his technical skills as a master electrician with an artist’s vision of how science could reflect our artistic life.
Alquist’s
earliest exhibitions in Chicago included group shows at N.A.M.E and the Randolph
Street Gallery where, with the assistance of IPA, he once set up 30 industrial
fans in opposing arrays for an installation called “When Push Comes
to Shove.”
Alquist
went on to become the chairman of the art department at the University of
Arizona in Tucson and started its first film studies program. His work has
been exhibited in Tucson, Phoenix, San Francisco and Chicago. This catalog
includes posters for two of Alquist’s most influential shows in Chicago
and Ogden, Utah. Beloved by friends and students, Alquist died of cancer in
2004.
JULES BACKUS
Jules Backus (1945-2000) spent most of his career in New York
and California, but he was an honorary member of IPA from its very inception.
Backus’s
work in video art dates back to the early days of TVTV and includes collaborative
roles in such artist collectives as Ant Farm, Ideas in Motion, Image Union
and The 90’s.
While making his living as a video cameraman, Backus also was intrigued by photography. In the late 90’s he took several extended trips to Paris where he spent six months
photographing
the graffiti art of Paris. On his return, Backus contracted lyme disease and
died.
Before his death, Backus managed to produce for exhibition 50 original photographs of Paris graffiti that were exhibited at the Cooper Union in New York. IPA was privileged to help mount the exhibit and presents in this catalog the first two pieces in the collection ever offered for public sale.
DAVID BELLE
For over 10 years, David Belle was Chicago’s most generous photographer, helping IPA and other independent producers document their work. He took the photo for our infamous “Stop N Eat” party as well many other corporate affairs.
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But
Belle also had a photographer’s eye for unusual street scenes and an
uncanny feel for the moment, as seen in this classic photo of the last night
baseball game in the old Comiskey Park. Today, he teaches computer art at
St. Gregory's School in Chicago.
The last night baseball game in the old Comiskey Park is memorialized in this historic photograph taken from the box seats of White Sox fan Tom Weinberg.
The photograph captures a moment in 1990 during the last night game before the stadium was torn down when, with Carlton Fisk on first base and Robin Ventura on third, rookie Frank Thomas steps to the plate for his 25th major league at bat (see scoreboard.) Eight copies of the photograph were produced. Seven are in private collections.
This photograph is being exhibited as framed, but is offered for sale here only as an unframed print.
BETH BEROLZHEIMER
Beth
Berolzheimer is a video editor and teacher at Columbia College in Chicago.
In her first industry job almost 25 years ago, she was also IPA's first video
editing assistant.
To help us fill our many bare walls, she contributed three photo portraits of her friend Christine sleeping.
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They
are as profoundly intriguing now as they were on the first day they were put
up and we are proud to offer them to you as art works today.
RENATA BRETH
Renata Breth started her art career as the night operations manager at IPA. But her unique photo-naturalistic images and meticulous work in Cibachrome printing soon led to film and photo exhibitions worldwide in Vienna, New York, Milan and Belgrade. Today, she is a professor of art at Santa Rosa Jr. College in California.
Breth
has had a life-long love affair with the Chicago Cubs. She married her husband
Steve in an airplane over Wrigley Field during a playoff game and gave to
IPA this souvenir of her years here.
ROGER BROWN
Roger Brown (1941-1997) was one of Chicago’s preeminent
visual artists, a founding member of the Chicago Imagists renown for establishing
Chicago as a center of art in the late twentieth century. 
His work from 1970 through his death in 1997 is collected throughout the world.
In 1986, he produced an oil painting called “Only the
Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent.” This lithographic
print poster was produced in 1988 by the Phyllis Kind Gallery 
and
hung for many years in the IPA sound suite. Please note there are minor scratches
on the picture surface.
RICH DUCASSE
Rich DuCasse was IPA’s senior graphic artist at a time when computer graphics exploded on the video scene. He arrived shortly after we received our first Quantel Paintbox and left seven years later after Discreet Logic introduced the first of its Flame software products.
His
tenure at IPA coincided with the introduction of Adobe’s first Photoshop
program and Apple’s introduction of a computer they called a Macintosh.
Along with Paul Marvine, DuCasse provided many of the first IPA advertisements,
one of which is included in this show. This IPA logo was produced by DuCasse
to celebrate our 10th anniversary in 1992.
SCOTT JACOBS
Scott Jacobs is the founder and president of Independent Programming Associates, which he liked to call IPA because he thought it sounded a lot like IBM. While running IPA, Jacobs also engaged in a variety of persoonal projects and became known for never passing up an opportunity to pass off his own work as “art.”
This
poster announces a 1997 “discussion & reading” of his book
STUMP, A Campaign Journal at the Barnes & Noble on Webster Street.
The Stump Connolly image is based on an original drawing by Casey Stockdon.
(Stump's latest reports from the 2004 presidential campaign trail are due
out next Spring in a book called Talk's Cheap, Let's Race!)
KAZU
Kazu Okutomi is a world famous Chicago commercial photographer with a studio just across the street from IPA. Kazu’s high-end special effects photography for clients like Playboy, Pioneer, Hewlett Packard and other Fortune 500 companies have made him a legend in the advertising world.
But
Kazu also values the simple life. Away from the advertising world, Kazu has
chosen to make sharply detailed black & white photographs of the simplest
tools available to man.
This 1998 poster for his exhibition “Kazu In Black And White” features his photograph of traditional hand tools used in Japanese woodworking. He gave it to IPA in recognition of our many years as neighbors and friends.
CHIP LORD
Chip Lord is best known as one of the founders of the Ant Farm collective and a pioneer of video art in the 1970’s.
His early and most famous work was a commission to bury ten Cadillacs along a Texas highway, tail fins out, for Cadillac Ranch. With his other ant farm cohorts -- including IPA partner Starr Sutherland – he drove a modified Cadillac through an array of TV’s in 1972 for a classic videotape called Media Burn.
Lord has been a video pioneer and digital imagist for three
decades and is now a professor of video art at the University of California
Santa Cruz.
This piece, consisting of two separately framed photographs shown together, was first displayed at the Rena Branston Gallery in San Francisco.
One image was taken at the auto entrance of the Apple Computer headquarters in Cupertino, California. The other was shot near the Los Angeles city center. The images are Iris prints from a digital file/type C print off a color negative.
DON PETERSON
Don Peterson (1948-1982) was a West Coast photographer with a bright future before his untimely death at the age of 34 in an auto accident on the West Coast Highway. He made both artistic and commercial photographs, always searching for ways to bring both together.
His early death coincided with IPA’s founding and his photographs came to populate our walls through the executor of his estate, IPA partner Starr Sutherland.
This
signature photograph was first used in 1984 to announce the arrival at IPA
of Sony’s first Betacam editing machine. It has since come to symbolize
our resolve to always challenge the old media conventions.
Before IPA adopted it as a corporate symbol, the photo graced the cover of New West magazine promoting a story on aggressive TV advertising.
Peterson worked extensively to develop a signature photo-within-a-photo look.
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This
photograph captures the fence line in a San Francisco housing project inset
into a photograph of the housing project itself. San Francisco’s now
famous Proof Frog design company did the original printing when it was still
primarily an art printing house.
This 1979 signed photo shows Peterson’s early interest in photographic detail. The ordinary line between bricks and grass is magnified in the inset photo to show neither the bricks nor the grass are real. Both live in a synthetic world that only photographic detail can reveal.
This
photograph hung in the original IPA graphics suite when it was still a second
floor kitchen known as the graphics department.
KAY ROSEN
We don’t know how it came into our possession, but we believe we have in our IPA art collection an early original from one of Chicago’s most esteemed modern artists.
Kay
Rosen has been exhibited and collected around the world by the Art Institute
of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, New York Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, and Whitney Museum, among others.
Early on in IPA’s existence, as a support facility for independent producers, we sometimes accepted art in lieu of payment. RAIN BOW WOW was a piece we were so impressed by that we framed and hung it over our copy machine – and admired it for two decades without knowing where it came from or who did it.
STARR SUTHERLAND
One of the founding partners of IPA, Starr Sutherland has put his mark on every wall, every room, every countertop and every person who ever graced IPA’s doors.
For too many years, he was the elusive partners who came in the night from California, tore down and rebuilt an editing suite, then disappeared again before anyone could ask, as they would in a TV serial, who was that masked man?
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Sutherland
has made a career out of helping others produce independent films. But he
has his own extensive resume of films as well, including Bring Me Your
Love, an adaptation of a Charles Bukowski story, and Percy Mayfield:
Poet Laureate of The Blues, a documentary on the man who wrote “Hit
the Road, Jack.”
This is a photograph Sutherland took in April 1980 while on the road with Scott Jacobs and Tom Finerty for the documentary Hobo. It shows a lone grocery somewhere near Sacramento taken between hops off a freight train.
MARY JO TOLES
Mary Jo Toles will always be remembered as the first artist who ever got Scott to spend $800 for a picture frame – and as the contributor of some of our most memorable wall images.
Toles is a 1973 graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art who came in 1981 to get her MFA from the School of the Art Institute.
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When not helping paint IPA walls, Toles worked at home on a Durst/Besaler photographic enlarger making “cameraless photographs.” Using high voltage strobes and saturated dyes , Toles produced a series of stunning magnifications of everything from the rice bits in alphabet soup to the fading roots of recent plant cutbacks.
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Her large-scale pieces provided an early glance at the vast changes coming to photography via digital imaging.
Her work now resides in the collections of The First National Bank, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Florida Permanent Collection , The MacArthur Foundation and a number of private collectors.
What Toles did with plants she repeated with lettering from alphabet soup boxes, meticulously hand-placing letters on paper and photographing the outcome through the Durst/Besaler printing.
For
the last 17 years, Toles has been the Michael Feldstein Professor of Video
Art and chair of the Photo, Film and Video department at the Cleveland Institute
of Art.
We
are pleased to offer here four of her most significant pieces, as well as
a poster she designed for the “Constructed Photographs” exhibition
in March, 1981 at Edinboro State College in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.
Her mimicking of building permit detail in the poster is so real it once convinced a local politician that our unauthorized construction of a new editing suite was sanctioned by this permit.
DIRK WALES
Dirk Wales is a long-time Chicago film director who has taken up residence in New Mexico where he has a fast-growing reputation as a southwest artist of note.
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Wales'
Rainbow Productions was a frequent client of IPA. Over the years, he generously
and graciously sent us annual calendars of his photography.
To curry favor with our scheduling department during one especially busy year,
he also dropped off this piece with us that we call “To Do.”
FRANK ZAPONE
IPA has always been amused and well rewarded by our relationship with the Bumbershoot Arts Festival in Seattle. Bumbershoot was one of our first clients and, over three decades, it has been a friend and fellow traveler on the road to new artistic horizons.
In 1997, Bumbershoot gave to IPA a poster from its upcoming festival that always intriqued and amazed us. The poster artist was Frank Zaponi who, having contributed this piece, has since fallen into Pacific Northwest legend as the artist who just disappeared.
