Frank Piatek  Frank Piatek (born 1944) is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. In "Art in Chicago 1945-1995", the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974. Francis Piatek, Jr. was born in 1944 in Chicago into a Polish- and Swedish-American family. His late father, Frank, Sr., was a community activist and neighborhood association president and has honorific street signs in his name. Piatek was raised in the city's ethnic Irving Park neighborhood and began creating art when he attended nearby Lane Technical High School, which bordered the Riverview amusement park; in the 1970s, when he rented a studio across from the park after it closed, its ruins played a role in his work of the time. After a childhood in which he was stricken with polio, he studied at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), earning BFA (1967) and MFA (1971) degrees. He attracted critical attention as an undergraduate, including a 1967 studio visit by Whitney Museum curator John Baur and Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) director Don Baum that led to his inclusion in the 1968 Whitney Biennial; that same year, he received a Ryerson Travel fellowship from SAIC.