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Biography
Best known as a public artist, John Pitman Weber has also been active in the
studio, painting, drawing and making prints, for over thirty years. He has
had 30 solo shows, including 5 in New York City.
Recent solo
exhibits were at St. Xavier University, Chicago; ARC Gallery, Chicago; and
at A Sheynerer Velt gallery in Los Angeles. In the 80's and early 90's
he showed frequently in worship spaces. Valparaiso University gave him a
mid-career retrospective in 1991 and in 1998 Taller Mestizarte, Chicago,
hosted a retrospective of his prints. He has
participated in numerous group shows, including several major traveling
shows. One of his paintings recently returned to the Spertus Museum after
two years in the "Bridges and Boundaries" traveling exhibit from the Jewish
Museum, NYC. He is an active member of the Piece Process
Palestinian
and Jewish joint exhibiting art group.
In 2005, Weber
completed a collaboration with French sculptor Henri Marquet on a mosaic
covered sculptural play-plaza for Sabin School, Chicago. In 2000, he and Nina Smoot Cain led the Iowa project for
"Artists and Communities, America Creates for the Millenium." With hundreds
of local volunteers, they created "The Gathering," a mosaic plaza with
columns and curving walls, in Spencer, IA. He has collaborated on mosaics
with Ms. Cain since 1998, as well as with Tracy VanDuinen, especially at the
Beth-Anne Campus of Bethel New Life in the Austin area of Chicago's West
Side. Mr. Weber has also created public works in New York City, Los Angeles,
Minneapolis, North Dakota and Georgia, England, France, and Nicaragua. Weber
has also worked with multi-colored concrete relief, sgraffito, and carved
brick.
Weber has
lectured and led workshops in France, Mexico, Belgium, and Scotland. Weber
co-founded the Chicago Mural Group (now Chicago Public Art Group) with
William Walker in 1970. He continues as an active artist with the Chicago
Public Art Group. He authored, with Eva and James Cockcroft, Toward A
People's Art, the classic account of the early years of the contemporary
mural movement, reissued in 1998, in an expanded edition by U. of New Mexico
Press.
Mr. Weber studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, and Harvard University. He
learned intaglio printmaking with S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17 and lithography
with Ray Martin and Mark Pascale at the School of the Art Institute. He
teaches at Elmhurst College, Elmhurst IL.
He lives in
Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood and has four sons.
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