There’s a nicely curated selection of Art Shay’s photography up through May 27 at Gallery Victor. It includes a lot of familiar images—Marlon Brando kissing his dog, Hugh Hefner with typewriter and playmates in his bedroom office, and, of course, Simone de Beauvoir’s bare bum. Iconic photos of entertainers, athletes, and politicians share the wall with street shots of kids in hardscrabble neighborhoods and pivotal public moments from the war years of the 1940s to the civil rights movement and social upheaval of the 60s.
Shay, who was also a writer, started out as a Life magazine reporter before he became a freelance photographer for that publication as well as all the other photo-heavy national magazines of the mid-20th century. He and his wife, Florence, settled in suburban Chicago in the 1950s and raised their five children there. Three of the kids also became photographers. This show, titled “Father and Son,” also features photos by Richard Shay, who’s had access to the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan. The work is hung separately, with the exception of twin images of Ann Landers taken decades apart. The elder Shay’s photos are offered for sale at prices ranging from $3,000 to $12,500.
Art Shay died April 28, 2018, at the age of 96. There’s no hint in this orderly exhibit of the messy, multiyear court battle raging behind the scenes between his two major heirs—Art’s archivist, Erica DeGlopper, and Richard. It’s a battle playing out in four states and multiple counties, but mostly at the Lake County courthouse in Waukegan, Illinois, where they both appeared via Zoom for a hearing last week.
Without getting too deeply into the weeds: Art left 48 percent ownership of his photography archive to Richard and the same amount to DeGlopper, a School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduate who’d been organizing, documenting, and promoting his enormous body of work since 2005. (When I interviewed Art at his home for a Reader column in 2007, she was there, her massive project just getting underway.) Jeffrey Dembo, a friend and the executor of Art’s estate, was left a pivotal 4 percent.
In January 2018, three months before he died, Art also signed a notarized ten-year agreement making DeGlopper his representative “in all matters pertaining to the sale or use” of his photographic archive and establishing a 50 percent commission for her on any income the archive might earn.
But the relationship between DeGlopper and the other two owners of the Art Shay Archives Project LLC quickly soured. She claims she hasn’t been paid since September 2019 for her work or for expenses that she personally covered (including the cost of three out-of-town Shay exhibits) and hasn’t received commissions or ownership distributions from sales by the LLC. She charges that the other two owners scuttled a deal she was arranging for a sale of about 100 photos to the Green Bay Packers; that Shay subsequently “raided” her home [in a court-ordered removal process], taking the archive as well as other possessions without accounting for them; and that they are trying to push her out of the LLC.
Shay claims in court documents that DeGlopper took sole possession of the archive and moved part of it to Florida without the other owners’ permission; that she withdrew $17,500 from the LLC business bank account, also without permission; that she refused to comply with a court order to return the archive to Chicago; and that she’s been “erratic,” “disruptive,” and defamatory in person and via email.
It didn’t help that in 2020, in Madison, Wisconsin, DeGlopper defaced public murals by Black artists that had been commissioned in the wake of the George Floyd protests by adding anti-China messages to them—incidents she refers to as “performance art.” This, Shay argues, reflected badly on the archive, which includes his father’s extensive chronicling of racism in America and the struggle to overcome it.
Shay’s been granted two orders of protection against DeGlopper and in 2021 won a $743,000 (plus interest) judgment in a breach of duty, infliction of distress, and defamation lawsuit against her, which he’s trying to collect through a foreclosure sale of her share of the LLC, to be conducted by the Lake County Sheriff. She’s contesting that, arguing, among other claims, that the collection is worth millions, and that a sheriff’s sale is not the proper forum for it.
In court last week, Shay’s lawyer, Konstantinos Armiros, claimed DeGlopper had displayed a gun during a recent Zoom hearing, and 19th Circuit Court associate judge Michael Betar advised her to “chill out a bit.”
Shay is seeking an extension of his most recent order of protection; DeGlopper is fighting both that and the order for a sheriff’s sale. The next Waukegan court dates are set for May 19 and June 27.
UPDATE: Friday, May 26: In a hearing at the Lake County Courthouse and on Zoom, Art Shay’s longtime archivist Erica DeGlopper testified that the gun she’d been accused of displaying during a previous hearing is a toy gun, and that she doesn’t own a real gun. Nevertheless, Circuit Court Judge R. Christopher Ditton—presented with evidence and testimony about numerous harassing emails from DeGlopper to Art Shay’s son, Richard, and his associates—granted Richard Shay a 6-month extension to a protective order against her.