Jan Tichy

Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Professor at the Departments of Photography and Art & Technology/Sound Practices. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Chicago Cultural Center among others. His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York and Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. His large public art projects engage communities and offer platforms to share. In 2011 Project Cabrini Green illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago and Beyond Streaming: a sound mural for Flint at the Broad Museum in Michigan in 2017 brought teens from Flint and Lansing to share their experience of the ongoing water crisis. In 2018 Tichy was one of the inaugural artists for Art on the MART. In 2019 he co-edited and curated Ascendants: the Bauhaus Handprints collected by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy published by IIT Press. His 2020 yearlong project Remote Pyramids in Dallas, TX brought together local Latinx teenagers with refugee teens to critically and creatively address issues of migration. In 2023, within the framework of Chicago Architecture Biennale, Tichy reconstructed the whitewashed mural All Of Mankind by William Walker on the façade of Joffrey Ballet Chicago. Most recently Tichy co-curated the first major retrospective of Lucia Moholy at Kunsthalle Prague and Fotostiftung Schweiz.