Robert Storr, the first American Director of Visual Arts for the Venice Biennele, former Senior Curator of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Painting and Sculpture and esteemed writer. Storr has taught at CUNY, Harvard, RISD, the NY Studio School, Bard, Tyler School of Art, lectured internationally and is currently a tenured professor at Yale's Department of Painting and Printmaking wrote the following about Jim Chatelain in 2023:
I first became acquainted with Jim Chatelain's work when I saw an encounter painted by him hanging in the New York loft of a bellow Chicago expat and friend, John Obuck, who had formerly been part of the (Detroit) Cass Corridor group. Then, during roughly the same period I saw a selection of his work in Marcia Tucker's 1978 landmark "Bad" Painting show at the New Museum in downtown Manhattan, back in the day when many of us felt obligated to take adamant exception to the exaggerated, coercively "normalizing" claims of "mainstream" modernism.
Already an outspoken fan of Philip Guston, lonely renegade of the original "New York School," I was sold on Chatelain, and am to this day. He had and still has a wonderfully blunt way with a brush and a gritty vision altogether worthy of the rustbelt midwest. Call him Detroit's Nelson Algren of painterly painting, and then take a walk on the wildside with him as your guide. You'll meet a cast of hard-bit-ten urban types, extraordinary toughness whose heavily lined faces bear the unmistakable trace of what it takes to just keep going in the late modern purgatory that is big city life in our time. Chatelain knows these people inside and out; he's their recording angel.
A native of Findlay, Ohio, Jim Chatelain studied painting at Wayne State University in Detroit, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1971. That same year Chatelain shared the raw space of the noted Willis Gallery with Nancy Mitchnick and Ellen Phelan. The then young Chatelain, like Mitchnick and Phelan, would soon become synonymous with a group of artists, poets, writers, and musicians that lived and worked along Detroit’s Cass Corridor and whose work would form the defining exhibition Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor 1963-1977 presented at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1980-81).
His work was also included in “Bad” Painting, Marcia Tucker’s seminal exhibition for the New Museum, NY. He now splits his time between metro Detroit and Delhi, NY. Chatelain’s work may be found in numerous private and public collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts and Wayne State University.