Ride your bicycle to some free culture

Working from his studio in the Loop, Chicagoan Tom Bachtell's distinctive drawings and caricatures appear each week in "The Talk of the Town" and other sections of The New Yorker where he has been a regular contributor for some 20 years. Tom’s work is seen in many other national and international publications, from Entertainment Weekly to Newsweek, Forbes to Bon Appetit, Town and Country to Mother Jones, as well as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, The New York Observer, London’s Evening Standard, and Poetry magazine. His ad campaigns range from the late Marshall Field's department store to Lands' End mail order to the chamber music series at The University of Chicago. Cal Performances, the performing arts presenter at the University of California, Berkeley, commissioned a series of original drawings for their 2011–2012 season.


Trained as a pianist at the Cleveland Institute of Music and with a liberal arts degree from Case Western Reserve University, Tom is self-taught as an artist. Working primarily in brush and ink, Tom's drawing style pays homage to many of the classic American illustrators and cartoonists of the 1920s and 1930s. He has drawn countless celebrities and politicians -- including more than his share of George W. Bushes. Tom is the illustrator of When I Knew (HarperCollins), edited by Robert Trachtenberg, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He frequently portrays musicians, doing regular work with the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Awards (Kalamazoo, Michigan) and the Risør International Chamber Music Festival in Norway.

Exhibits of his work have been shown at the offices of The New Yorker and in Chicago at The Cliff Dwellers as well as at the invitational exhibitions Drawing the Candidates at The New York Times and Politics ’08 at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan. His illustrated talk, How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Start Drawing Mariah Carey: My Life As a Cartoonist, was commissioned as a Marquis Lecture at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and has also been given at The Arts Club of Chicago.

An active chamber pianist, Tom also performs and teaches swing dancing, particularly the Lindy and the Balboa.

Dates: November 12, 2012 - February 24, 2013

Hours: Monday - Saturday, 10 am - 6:30 pm; Sundays 10 am - 5 pm

Location:

City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower

806 N. Michigan Ave

Chicago, IL 60611