Joyceculver.com

Joyce.culver@verizon.net

Karen I. Hirsch

karen@karenihirsch.com

www.karenihirsch.com

www.karenihirsch.com/visualart

Karen I. Hirsch is an international award-winning photographer and digital artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work spans editorial, commercial, and fine art photography, with a distinctive style that captures the essence of her subjects through color, composition, and timing.

Hirsch’s photographs have been featured in prestigious publications such as Communication Arts, Graphis, Architectural Digest, Forbes, and the Chicago Tribune. Her images are part of corporate and private collections and have been exhibited in galleries across the globe – including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Berlin and Basel.

Among Hirsch’s numerous awards was the grand prize in the Chicago Daily News/Kodak competition, best photo in an American Society of Magazine Photographers contest and grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Alliance.

Hirsch studied with master photographers Ernst Haas, Jay Maisel and Arnold Newman.

In 2003, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs hosted her solo exhibition “My Chicago,” a 25-year retrospective showcasing over 200 images of the city’s people, places, and events. In 2007, she was among ten foreign photographers invited by the Chinese government to document the city of Rizhao.

An active member of the photographic community, Hirsch serves as co-president of the Fort Dearborn-Chicago Photo Forum and is affiliated with the ASMP, the American Photographic Artists and the American Photography Archives Group.

Ave Pildas

avepildas.com

avepildas@gmail.com

Whether photographing jazz greats in smoke-filled clubs, the gritty theatrics on infamous

Hollywood Boulevard, or the spontaneous interactions between people and animals at

locations worldwide – Ave Pildas offers a rich and diverse survey of contemporary life.

Ave began his arts education as an architecture student, designing department stores, and

government and medical buildings. Before long, this path felt too conservative and

constricting, so he changed majors to design. Creating products, packaging, and graphics

provided enough diversity to seem like “complete freedom” at the time. Concurrently, Ave

was designing exhibits, displays, graphics, and publications for the Cincinnati Public

Library. After studying at the University of Cincinnati and graduating from the Cincinnati Art

Academy in 1962, Ave headed east to Pittsburgh, where he worked designing collateral for

U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Koppers, and Westinghouse. At Westinghouse, he

met renowned graphic designer Paul Rand.

With encouragement from Rand and well-known typographer Noel Martin, Ave traveled to

Switzerland and enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule, studying typography and graphic

design during the Cold War. As a student, he visited every country in Europe and parts of

North Africa, often by car. It was at this time that Ave set the lofty goal of “raising the visual

conscience” of the world, and, at the conclusion of his studies, accepted a position as

assistant professor at Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in

Philadelphia. Since then, he has taught at Layton School of Art, Leicester Polytechnic in

Britain, Cal Arts, Art Center College of Design, UCLA, USC, as well as Otis College of Art

and Design, where he served as Chair of the Communication Arts Department. He is

currently Professor Emeritus at Otis.

Ave has been taking photos that combine his observational ability with his prowess as a

designer for over fifty years. His photographs have appeared in national and international

publications. Many of his images of Hollywood Boulevard from the 1970s are represented

in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the New York

Public Library, and appear in Ave’s latest Monograph, Star Struck (2022, Deadbeat Club

Press). Three other books of his photographs have been published previously: Art Deco LA

(1978, Harper & Row), Movie Palaces: Los Angeles (2000, Clarkson Potter), and Bijou (2016,

Nazraeli Press).

ERNEST STONE | 1918-1992

erneststone.com

Contact Melissa Berman at erneststoneart@gmail.com

Ernest Stone was a very public figure in New York City in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s —

a top 40 disc jockey with WMCA, broadcast personality on WNET Channel 13, actor,

and founding member of Off Broadway’s respected repertory company New Stages.

But privately, he led a second creative life, as a photographer. Walking miles each day

through the neighborhoods of NYC, he was an intrepid chronicler of a city in a time of

transition and upheaval, on the razor’s edge between the classical and the modern.

For two decades, Stone, who was born and raised in Flatbush Brooklyn to immigrant

parents, explored his adult home of Manhattan capturing the landscape, politics,

counter-culture and people. He also experimented in abstracts, still life, and a

personal study of the shifts in a post-war Europe.

Except for a one-man show at the Rina Gallery in 1974 (entitled “New York A to Z”), Stone

eschewed the business side of fine art, preferring to keep his work almost entirely private.

Just before his death in 1992, he told his niece he was “ready for my work to be out in

the world.” Today, she is working with Augusta Edwards Fine Art to present his story and

his extensive archive, including a series of collages that supplement his photography in

intriguing ways.

Erwan Illian was an amateur photographer in the 70’s.
As he traveled to Paris, then later to the American South, landing finally in New York City in 1978, Photography was a way to discover the new world around him. Even though he never made a living as a photographer, he continued to pursue it “on the side” until he eventually stopped in 1982. Later he moved to Northern California and became a cabinet-maker.
He is now looking for ways to preserve and present some of that work, while working on a book around photos taken at CBGB’s circa 1979/1982.