Jack Balas is interested in recontextualizing images of men in a variety of emotional, political and stylistic scenarios -- contexts in which they function as everyman, but are more vulnerable than their surface perfection might suggest.

Born in Chicago in 1955, Jack Balas received his BFA and MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in Painting in 1995. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. A portfolio of his paintings, "Today I Drove Along the Rio Grande," was published in The Paris Review (New York). His most recent museum solo was his 2008 project "We'll Be Seeing You" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.