Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art is proud to present The Circus Collages of C.T. McClusky from January 11 - May 25. The opening reception will take place on Friday, January 11 from 5-8pm and is free and open to the public.

We know very little of C.T. McClusky's biography except that he worked as a circus clown and spent the winter seasons of 1940-1960 at a boarding house in Oakland, California. Working with found materials, McClusky completed 53 collages on shirt cardboard incorporating foil, string, photographic illustrations and cuttings from animal cracker boxes. His evocative images are sentimental reflections on his time in the circus and depicts daily circus life creating windows onto a world peopled by bally broads, musicians, trapeze artists, and lion tamers.

The work was discovered in a tattered black suitcase by John Turner -- then curator at the Museum of Craft and Folk art in San Francisco -- at the Alameda Penny Market Swap Meet in California 1975. The Circus Collages of C.T. McClusky, featuring 24 collages and the suitcase they were found in, will be the first solo exhibition of McClusky's work in Chicago.