Death Magic: Guest curated by Ryan Michael Pfeiffer

Ron Athey (b. 1961) is an American performance artist based in Los Angeles, widely regarded as a central figure in body art and "extreme" live art since the 1980s. His work grew out of the post-punk/pre-goth scene, beginning with Premature Ejaculation, an early collaboration with Rozz Williams. Raised in a Pentecostal household, Athey channels themes of ritual, sexuality, trauma, and the AIDS crisis into performances involving bloodletting, piercing, and other bodily ordeals, most famously in his 1990s "Torture Trilogy." He's since worked across theater, opera, and sculpture, and was the subject of a 2018–19 career retrospective, Queer Communion, at the ICA Los Angeles.

Marquis (Franz) von Bayros (1866–1924) was an Austrian illustrator and painter, born in Zagreb, best known by the nickname "Marquis de Bayros" - a nod to the Marquis de Sade. A trained academic artist who moved in Vienna's high society, he became notorious for erotic, ornately decadent illustrations of classic erotic literature, most infamously his 1911 portfolio Tales at the Dressing Table, which got him prosecuted and exiled from Germany. He drew over 2,000 illustrations in total and died in Vienna in 1924 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Rachael Bos (b. 1999, Salt Lake City) is a Chicago-based painter and SAIC graduate whose oil paintings and graphite drawings find abstract, formally rigorous compositions in athletic imagery — leotards, uniforms, and Olympic gymnastics in particular. Her work has shown in Chicago, New York, London, and at EXPO Chicago.

Jamie Fletcher (b. 1986) is an American multi-disciplinary artist based in Red Rock, Texas, working in painting, assemblage, and installation. Her mixed-media work draws on her experience living in rural Texas, including bleach-rendered portraits of local drifters, altars built from found materials, and self-portraits made through gunfire and metal. Together, these pieces confront the risks of living as a woman in a lawless, conservative environment.

Danny Frownfelter (b. 1979) is a Chicago artist with Arts of Life, a nonprofit studio supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. His subject matter often explores dichotomies of religion and the destructive forces of super villains, rendered in high-contrast, bold brushstrokes with figures gazing directly at the viewer. He's also the singer for the Arts of Life studio band Van Go Go.

Norbert Kox (1945–2018) was a self-taught American outsider artist from Green Bay, Wisconsin, known for densely layered, apocalyptic religious paintings he called "Apocalyptic Visual Parables." Born on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima - a coincidence he saw as an omen - Kox lived a rough early life as a high-school dropout, soldier, and outlaw-biker gang member before a spiritual crisis in the late 1970s sent him into a decade of hermitic retreat in the Wisconsin woods. He developed his own translucent-glaze painting technique and exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair every year from 1994 onward.

Billy Lilly (b. 1972) is a Chicago artist with Arts of Life whose marker drawings are steeped in heavy metal imagery - skulls, tornadoes, lightning, and cyborgs. A self-proclaimed "metal-head," his art is very much inspired by the music he listens to, and he has said he draws tornadoes, lightning, and skulls because they're rock and roll.

Monika Plioplyte is a Chicago-based, Lithuanian-born artist who immigrated to the U.S. in her early teens and holds an MFA from SAIC and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Working across printmaking, sculpture, performance, and photography, she often uses her own body as subject or object, with storytelling animated by Baltic pagan symbolism, female archetypes, personal ritual, and the uncanny. She's exhibited at venues including the Hyde Park Art Center and Mana Contemporary, and was a founder of Iron Wolf Press in Boston.

Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914–1993) was a visionary American jazz composer, bandleader, and keyboardist from Birmingham, Alabama, who became one of the most radical figures in 20th-century music. After relocating to Chicago in the late 1940s, he abandoned his birth name and took the name Le Sony'r Ra, claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, developing a mythical persona that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Leading his ever-shifting ensemble The Arkestra, he pioneered free jazz and electronic keyboards, staging theatrical performances with dancers in Egyptian and space-age-inspired costumes, and recorded hundreds of albums, many self-released on his own label.

Philipp Schöpke (1921–1998) was an Austrian art brut artist associated with the famed Gugging psychiatric art center outside Vienna. Born in Lower Austria, he left school after repeatedly failing to advance grades, worked as a laborer, and was drafted into the German army before being discharged as unfit; after a breakdown he became a permanent resident of the Klosterneuburg psychiatric hospital. He moved into Gugging's "House of Artists" in 1981, where he drew obsessively - often in bursts of hyperactivity followed by long silences - producing pencil and crayon portraits of people, animals, and airplanes that reveal internal organs and are annotated with names and ages.

Jon Serl (1894–1993) was a self-taught American painter whose eccentric life before art rivaled his art itself. Born Josef Searls in Olean, New York, in 1894, he grew up in a vaudeville family and was reportedly kept underfed so he could perform as a female impersonator known as "Slats." He later worked as a Hollywood voice-over artist, migrant fruit picker, and gardener before settling into painting after World War II, eventually living in near-poverty in a ramshackle house in Lake Elsinore, California. His theatrical, expressionistic paintings of masked and costumed figures are now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and American Folk Art Museum, among others.

Bronislaw "Bruno" Sowa (1915–1995) was a Polish-born, self-taught American folk artist. Born in Lubomierz, Poland, he made oil paintings on carved and pyrography-decorated wooden panels, often embellished with glass jewels. His work is held in the collection of Chicago's Intuit Art Museum and was featured in its 2025 exhibition on immigrant self-taught artists, Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-Taught Art in Chicago.

Maria Vanik (b. 1970, Chicago) is an artist with Arts of Life whose vivid marker drawings pull from found imagery, pop culture, and personal memory. A member of the Chicago Studio since 2017, she brings a background in fiber and sculpture into a practice now centered on drawing, favoring bright, saturated colors and a distinctive approach to pattern and symbolism. Her work has appeared at EXPO Chicago and the Outsider Art Fair in New York.

Jean Wilson (b. 1958, Chicago) is a Chicago Studio artist with Arts of Life since 2007, known for ferocious paintings of real and mythical beasts - wolves, wildcats, birds of prey, werewolves, and three-headed hellhounds. Her feral menagerie of sharp talons, ragged fur, glowing eyes, and jagged teeth serves as a kind of personal talisman tied to her creative identity, an identity she reinforces by wearing animal masks and costumes while she works. She's exhibited at Intuit and the Chicago Cultural Center and can be heard on the Arts of Life Band's 2017 album.

Albert Zahn (1864–1953) was a self-taught folk sculptor known as the "Birdman of Baileys Harbor," Wisconsin. Born in Pomerania (then Prussia, now Poland), he immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager and became a successful dairy farmer, carving eagles, owls, and other birds into his own furniture as a hobby. After retiring in 1924, he built a concrete-block house in Baileys Harbor and covered it and its yard with hundreds of carved, brightly painted birds, angels, and folk figures - a self-made environment he called "Birds Park," painted by his wife Louise and now preserved in part by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.