Ray Yoshida papers, circa 1895-2010, bulk 1950-2005

Found herein is biographical documentation about Ray Yoshida, including award certificates, identification records, student records, and three interview transcripts. There is one video recording of a documentary short about Yoshida's art and object collection at his Chicago home.

This series is arranged alphabetically.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for blank pages, duplicates, health records, and videocassettes.

Most of this series consists of personal correspondence in the form of letters, postcards, and greeting cards from friends, colleagues, and artists. Notable correspondents include Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Art Green, Christina Ramberg, Karl Wirsum, Miyoko Ito, Jin Soo Kim, Barbara Rossi, Vera Berdich, and Tom Kapsalis, among others. Some letters are illustrated.

The bulk of the correspondence is arranged alphabetically by surname. The rest of the correspondence is arranged by first name since the last names were missing. Drafts of letters by Ray Yoshida and unidentified correspondence are at the end of the series. Access restricted letters from Jim Nutt are arranged in a separate container.

This series has been fully digitized.

Notebooks contain notes on art history, art technique, Japanese language, travel, and other subjects. Many of the notebooks include sketches and contain loose items such as news clippings.

This series is in rough chronological order.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for blank pages.

Ray Yoshida's writings for college courses, essay fragments on art and other subjects, and notes are in this series. Notes consist of lists, ideas, travel plans, and teaching material. Writings by others include essays by Yoshida's students, essay drafts for exhibitions, and poetry by Susan Wheeler.

Writings by Ray Yoshida are at the beginning of the series, followed by writings by others.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for duplicates and writings by others that are not related to Ray Yoshida or his work.

Teaching records primarily document Yoshida's tenure as a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, though a few records of guest professorships at other schools are included. These records are not comprehensive and consist of a few course evaluations, employment records, teaching notes, and photocopies of research material. Also found herein are numerous letters of recommendation he wrote for students. Miscellaneous teaching records are unsorted and include department memos, planning documents, course summaries, curriculums, correspondence, and notes.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago teaching records are grouped together at the beginning of the series and arranged alphabetically by document type. The general teaching records that are not associated with the Art Institute are grouped towards the end of the series.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for duplicates. Some records, such as letters of recommendation, student grades, and material related to the search for a new Art Institute dean, have not been digitized for privacy reasons. Only the first few pages of the Art Institute faculty handbook have been digitized.

Personal business records consist of material related to the sale, exhibition, and loan of artwork by Ray Yoshida. His business dealings with the Phyllis Kind Gallery are especially noteworthy. Business cards, address lists, business receipts, and a National Endowment for the Arts application are also included in this series. There are several files regarding the estate of artist Roger Brown and the establishment of the Roger Brown Study Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This series is arranged alphabetically.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for duplicates and material related to the Roger Brown estate papers.

This series mostly consists of printed material about Ray Yoshida and printed material collected by Yoshida for his own personal interest. Found herein are exhibition catalogs, invitations, announcements, clippings, magazines, newsletters and press releases documenting his career. There are also clippings about other artists and subjects. Collected printed material includes postcards, magazines, recipe books, and mail order catalogs.

The material in this series is arranged alphabetically by document type.

The bulk of this series has been digitized. Many of the exhibition catalogs and magazines have only had their covers, title pages, and relevant pages digitized. Some of the material that Ray Yoshida collected (such as mail order catalogs, recipe books, and wholesale catalogs) have only had their covers digitized. Miscellaneous magazines and clippings that are not about Ray Yoshida were not digitized.

Source material refers to clippings and other items that Yoshida gathered, usually from magazines and comic books, and probably intended to use for his art work. For example, there are many small clippings from comics meant for Yoshida's collages. Other source material includes postcards, mail order catalogs, magazines, product labels, advertisements, children's coloring books, empty papers bags, and wallpaper samples. Also included are assorted objects such as hairpins, buttons, and hairnets in their original packaging.

This series is arranged alphabetically.

This series has been selectively digitized. Due to the volume of source material and the fact that folders often contain multiple envelopes of tiny cutouts, only a small sampling of materials from several folders were digitized. The children's activity books and comic books have only had their covers digitized.

Photographs are of Ray Yoshida, friends, students, travel, and artwork. There are a few photographs of Karl Wirsum's studio. Yoshida collected photographs for his own interest and these include assorted photographs of celebrities, storefronts, and other subjects. One item of interest is an album of an unidentified family dating from the early 1910s that contains photographs of a young woman with her friends and family.

This series is arranged so that the photographs of Ray Yoshida are at the beginning, with the rest of the material arranged alphabetically by subject. The album and collected photographs are at the end of the series.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for blank versos and duplicates. Only a small sampling of the collected photographs were digitized. The unidentified family album was not digitized due to its fragility.

This series consists of twenty sketchbooks of mostly pencil and ink drawings, along with some watercolor sketches. A few sketchbooks contain loose items such as notes and clippings that were interleaved between the pages. Most sketchbooks are presumed to be by Yoshida, but researchers should note that it is possible that some sketchbooks belonged to students or other artists.

Most of the sketchbooks are undated, so the sketchbook numbers do not reflect chronological order.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for blank pages.

Artwork by Ray Yoshida includes paper collages, pencil sketches, and ink drawings. Artworks by others include numerous prints by Kathleen Blackshear, Ethel Spears, and Vivian Mayers, as well as collages, drawings, and prints given to Yoshida by students and friends. Other artwork in this series appears to have been created by children: these include handmade picture books, alphabet books, and paper collages. A few items such as hand-painted photographs and painted puzzle pieces were made by an unidentified artist, possibly Yoshida.

Artwork by Ray Yoshida is grouped together at the beginning of the series. The rest of the series is arranged alphabetically.

The bulk of this series has been digitized, except for some of the collected items, such as the voodoo kit and children's books, and some of the work by other artists.

There are eight scrapbooks in this series. Three of the scrapbooks containing source images, clippings, and comics, appear to have been created by Yoshida. Five additional scrapbooks were created by others that were collected by Yoshida: a child's scrapbook containing many clippings about the Dionne quintuplets, a scrapbook from the early 1900s containing clippings and ephemera, a scrapbook with clippings about juvenile delinquency that appears to have been created by a student for a class, a scrapbook full of assorted cards, and a detailed travel scrapbook created by Edward and Edna Hillier.

The scrapbooks by Ray Yoshida are grouped together at the beginning of the series, followed by scrapbooks created by others.

The scrapbooks by Ray Yoshida have been digitized. The scrapbooks by others have not been digitized.