Heads

Christina Ramberg’s imagery is usually composed of cropped fragments depicting bizarre fashions involving hair and binding components that resemble no popular fashion in the 1970s. Instead it seems to be derived loosely from the imagery of cultural anthropology: the head tightly bound and/or hair shorn and styled in constrictive modes speaks of ritualistic body art of ancient and non-western tribal cultures. Ramberg drew freely on the collections at Chicago’s Field Museum, from which her teachers at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), like Ray Yoshida (1930-2009) and Whitney Halstead (1926-1979), taught, to elaborate her idiosyncratic structural approach to figurative depiction. (See Smart Museum 2011.112 and 2001.662.)

When Ramberg made Heads she had begun teaching at the SAIC alongside fellow graduates Barbara Rossi and Phil Hanson, and their beloved teacher Ray Yoshida. A longtime SAIC teacher, Yoshida was a major influence on many of the Chicago Imagists. Heads was probably stimulated by Yoshida’s important series of collages of 1968-1969 in which he pasted text and images cut from comic books and newspaper “funnies” into ordered rows. In his later collage series Yoshida drew less on popular imagery than on his imagination, as did Ramberg in her work. (See 1996.19, 2011.14.)