by Carl Hayano
Carl Hayano (1934-2018)
Carl Hayano was born in the United States in 1934. In 1942, when he was eight years old, his family was forcibly relocated to the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona, one of the internment camps established by the U.S. government following Executive Order 9066. He lived there until 1944. Decades later, he gave oral history interviews about that experience for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.
After the war, Hayano built a career as one of the most distinctive artists working in Illinois. He joined the faculty at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where he taught painting, printmaking, and sculpture for many years and served as Graduate Director. Former students describe him as the person who opened their eyes to the Chicago art world -- the Hairy Who, Ed Paschke, and the broader community of artists who made the city a center of American art in the postwar decades.
His own work is immediately recognizable. Dense, grid-like compositions executed in oil and airbrush, layer upon layer, merging mathematical structure with visual rhythm. He had a dry sense of humor that showed up in his titles -- Holy Mackerel, Maguro, Sweet and Sour Pork, Halley's Sushi -- Japanese and Chinese culinary references woven into paintings of hypnotic geometric precision. Each work is marked with a traditional red chop mark and typically inscribed on the verso in his own handwriting.
He exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957, 1962, 1966, and 1981. In 1971 he was included in "The New Curiosity Shop" at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, alongside Claes Oldenburg, Man Ray, Lucas Samaras, and H.C. Westermann. His work is held in public collections at Northern Illinois University, Benedictine University in Lisle, and the Koehnline Museum of Art in Des Plaines.
The three paintings currently at Industrial Treasures -- Maguro (1977), Holy Mackerel (1978-79), and Sweet and Sour Pork (1979) -- went on tour in 1988 and remained wrapped in storage from that point until they arrived here. They have not been publicly displayed in over 35 years.