Ray Yoshida's Museum of Extraordinary Values

With essays from the series curator Karen Patterson; Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and Robert Cozzolino, senior curator and curator of modern art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the catalogue includes images of Yoshida's apartment and never-before-published archives and sketchbook pages by the artist.
Yoshida was among the most pivotal voices on the Chicago art scene from the 1960s until his death in 2009. Over his lifetime, he assembled an expansive and kaleidoscopic collection—ranging from works of art by self-taught artists and esteemed colleagues to souvenirs and whirligigs, from pop-culture treasures of Chicago's Maxwell Street Market to ritual masks of New Guinea. Yoshida's process of discovering and collecting these objects and images not only engendered his own tactile awareness of his surroundings, it also inspired generations of Chicago artists to find their own meaningful connections to the material world around them.