John Schacht was born in Chicago in 1938. He moved frequently as a child of alcoholic parents who divorced when he was young. Schacht spent his early teenage years in Florida, where he decided to pursue art at the age of thirteen after—as he would later claim—seeing every oil painting at his disposal. He returned to Chicago in 1954 to live with his father, soon after quitting high school and moving into a rooming house on Pearson Street. It was there that he first began to paint.
By the early 1960s Schacht had settled in Old Town. Living close to museums, libraries and bookstores, he began to explore the art world at large and develop his own work. Schacht held a variety of jobs at restaurants, hospitals, gay bars and used bookstores. He also worked for the Chicago antique dealer Harry Lund, a formative experience which had a great influence on his aesthetic interests.
In the early 70s Schacht bought a two-flat on Halsted Street in Lincoln Park. He worked as a cook and designed the menus at Otto’s Café, a neighborhood staple. There he met Charles (Chuck) Eaton and Jane Wenger, artistic peers with whom he would become lifelong friends.
Schacht was an avid collector of objects, artworks, antiques, ceramics, and religious and cultural artifacts, some of which were incorporated into his work. He sold objects from his collection when he had no other income, but was known to be generous with the artwork he made and what little money he had.
Relentlessly productive throughout the 1970s, Schacht’s work included drawings, paintings, collages, assemblages, writing and ritualistic performances. His studio practice was disciplined and orderly, but fueled continuously by cigarettes, dope, coffee, tea and music. Working on the periphery of the Chicago art world, he began to exhibit in small venues including the Old Town Ale House, The Chess House and La Mere Vipere, a pioneering gay bar and punk dance club.
In early 1973, unable to pay the mortgage and taxes, Schacht lost the building on Halsted. From 1973 to 1977 he lived and worked between Chicago and Indianapolis where his boyfriend, David Sales, played cello for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. There he worked part-time jobs at venues including The Indianapolis Museum of Art and The Indianapolis Art League, and as a visiting artist in high schools for the Indiana Arts Commission.
While in Indiana, Schacht worked with Lynn Karn—then an associate curator at the Indianapolis Museum of art—to produce an artist’s coloring book of his drawings entitled Gods in Search of a Myth. Published in 1975, the book was intended as a collaborative exercise in which readers would complete Schacht’s bold, ambiguous line drawings.
Schacht began to exhibit more frequently in the mid-1970s. He had a one-person exhibition at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis in 1976, and later that year completed a performance at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In 1977 Schacht returned to Chicago, where he rented a large basement studio in a former factory building in Wicker Park. There he hosted The Chapel of the Transfiguration, a Russian Orthodox church led by a priest named Elias Schinkevich. This exposure to eastern religion and iconography fed into his ongoing interest in esoteric rituals and spiritual practices.
Schacht’s work during this period ranged from delicate black-and-white pencil drawings of ambiguous bionic forms, to bold sketches in marker, kaleidoscopic mandalas, and brightly colored interior still lifes. In some of the more striking works on paper, Schacht depicts humanoid figures composed of both male and female genitalia, often restrained in chains or morphing into chairs and other furniture.
Much of Schacht’s work deals with erotic desire and the limitations of the sexual body. These concerns overlap—and sometimes coalesce with—a wide-ranging exploration of ornamentation. His most elaborate drawings incorporate exaggerated decorative elements of 19th- and 20th-century design, or make expansive use of forms such as leaves, flowers, lips, breasts, penises and organic abstract shapes. Repetition, ornamentation and sexual complexity are prominent not only in his major bodies of work, but in the countless sketchbooks he filled with poetry, plays and experimental writing.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Schacht exhibited more actively in Chicago. He was included in Seven by Nine, curated by Ellen Lanyon, at N.A.M.E. Gallery in 1978. The work from that show, including a two-sided drawing and collage by Schacht, were subsequently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Schacht was included in New Work by Four Chicago Artists at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1979, and was the subject of two solo exhibitions in the early 1980s, at Quantum Gallery and W.P.A. Gallery, an artist-run space directed by Chuck Eaton.
By late 1981, Schacht could no longer afford to live in Chicago. His friend Ed Homewood offered him a small cottage with no heat or running water in the country near Talmage, Iowa. Schacht continued to work throughout this period, although he exhibited much less frequently. He lived in the cottage throughout the decade, before relocating to Phoenix around 1990 to care for his dying father.
Schacht returned to Talmage five years later to find his home had been ransacked by his neighbors. Unable to live in the deteriorated cottage, he moved a trailer on to the property and installed a composting toilet, running water, heat and cooking gas. This new living arrangement did not last long. Feeling threatened by the neighbors, Schacht soon moved to a house in the nearby town of Leon, Iowa. In later years he continued to make work in his home studio, and visited Chicago occasionally. After a fall at home—he had been pinning up artwork in his stairwell—Schacht broke his hip. He suffered a heart attack in hospital, and died on August 10th, 2009, at the age of 71.
After Schacht’s death, Jane Wenger salvaged what was left of his work and moved it to Chicago. More than 800 artworks from the John Schacht Archive were photographed and cataloged. The Archive also included many more objects, works on paper, sketchbooks, photographs, letters and writings. Posthumous exhibitions of work from the Archive were held in 2016 at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, New York, and in 2018 at Iceberg Projects, Chicago.
The Archive began working in 2020 with the Kohler Foundation Inc. (KFI) to gift John Schacht’s work to art institutions whose collections aligned with his life and practice. In 2021, KFI facilitated two gifts, primarily of works on paper, to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, IL, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. In 2022, Jane Wenger gifted the entire Archive to Kohler Foundation, which is now working actively to place artworks and archival materials with museums and art institutions which will continue to be custodians of John Schacht’s practice well into the future.
