Bio
John Schulz was born in Superior, WI, and received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin – Superior, and began graduate work in Painting and Drawing at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. Schulz taught for three years as a Visiting Artist in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has taught at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, Penland School of Crafts, and the Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium. From 1995 – 2016, Schulz taught relief printmaking and drawing and served as a Graduate Advisor as Regular F/T Faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and then from 2016 – 2021 as Professor of the Practice in Print, Paper, and Graphic Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. In 2021, Schulz was appointed Professor of the Practice Emeritus in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts, and has since returned to the Upper Midwest where he maintains a full-time studio practice in Saint Paul, MN.
Schulz has recently exhibited at Hallspace Gallery, Boston; Gelb Gallery, Phillips Academy – Andover; the Edinburgh College of Art, UK; Virginia Arts of the Book Center, Charlottesville, VA; Academie Beeldende Kunsten, Gent, BE; and NK Gallery, Boston. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Glasgow Print Studio, UK; Boston Center for the Arts; John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago; Wellesley College; and Gallery Kayafas, Boston. Schulz’s work is in the collections of the Boston Public Library (Rare Books & Manuscripts/Artists Books), Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Frans Masereel Centrum Flemish Center for the Graphic Arts, Kasterlee, BE, and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, BE.
Artist’s Statement
Andre Breton, founder of Surrealism, once said: “The highest endeavor to which poetry can aspire is to compare two objects as remote as possible from one another, or by any method whatsoever, (to) bring them into confrontation in an abrupt and striking way.” In this way, new meanings reveal themselves through elements that remain otherwise undistinguished.
Pop art and Fluxus, the legacy of Dada, held not only that anything could become art if it were placed in the proper context but that the object itself could become self-critical, a reflection of the culture that produced it. Even the most banal images are deeply rooted in the fabric of day–to–day experience and the collective psyche. In archeological practice, a garbage heap has as much value, if not more, than the cultural relics in a dig. In the future, Western civilization will be defined as much by Wal-Mart residue as the contents of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I am an obsessive collector of printed matter, books, advertisements, giveaways, and other graphic detritus. My current body of work makes use of systematic random operations and cut-ups to make new narratives, reassembling images from my personal collection of American comics from the 1940s – 1950s held to be in the public domain. (ref. The Digital Comics Museum <https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/> and the Grand Comics Database <https://www.comics.org/>)
Overall, I see myself as deeply involved in a dialogue with the lower common denominators of visual culture. I am drawn to images that strike me as enigmatic, at once strangely beautiful and vaguely threatening, familiar things jerked out of context and thrust together as in “the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” (Comte de Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror, Canto VI, Verse 3)
In the end, I want my work to have a presence like furniture to which other meanings might be attached, to force the hand of chance, and make something beautiful from the cast-off and insignificant like the rubber gloves and artichokes in the paintings of deChirico. A critic once described my work as “essentially leaden and humorless.” I found that to be quite a sensitive observation and took it as a compliment.
Contact
jschulz2003@yahoo.com