Miyoko Ito was an American artist known for her watercolor and abstract oil paintings and prints. Ito was part of an informal group of like-minded, but visually diverse Chicago painters, self-named the "Allusive Abstractionists" and formed in 1981. The group, which also included William Conger, Richard Loving and Frank Piatek, was formed to spark dialogue and make space for a wider conception of abstraction that included more subjective, metaphorical work. Though tangentially involved with the Chicago Imagists, Ito's own style diverged and synthesized cubism and surrealism.
Miyoko Ito
William Conger is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of abstraction descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic space and light and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations. He is a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art. In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the new style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s. In his essay for Conger's fifty-year career retrospective, Donald Kuspit called Conger art-historically daring for forging a path of subjective abstraction after minimalism had allegedly purged painting of an inner life. Despite being abstract, his work has a strong connection to Chicago's urban, lakeside geography and displays idiosyncratic variations of tendencies identified with Chicago Imagist art. A hallmark of Conger's career has been his enduring capacity for improvisation and discovery within self-prescribed stylistic limits.
William Conger, in 2016.
William Conger, Flossy's Night, oil on canvas, 63" x 63", 1972
William Conger, South Beach, oil on canvas, 60" x 72", 1985
William Conger, City on the Make, oil on canvas, 60" x 96", 2001