A native of Appleton, Wisconsin, Loescher opened his students’ eyes to feminism, politics and the world beyond their hometowns, while shaping the SAIC in his role as the founder and longtime chair of its department of Art History, Theory and Criticism. He also had a significant impact on the Chicago art world: For decades, one couldn’t graduate from the SAIC without taking his undergraduate art history survey course, according to professor emeritus Thomas Sloan, and Loescher regularly visited former students’ studios. SAIC alums such as comics maestro Chris Ware and performance artist Pablo Helguera (whose School of Panamerican Unrest was a highlight of the MCA’s 2007 exhibition, “Escultura Social”) consider him a crucial influence.

Sloan remembers the boisterous and rotund Loescher taking up more than his share of the “tiny office” the two occupied in the 1980s, but he says, “It was fun to go to work—and so much of that was because of Bob’s enthusiasm; it was contagious.” Under Loescher’s direction, their department became famous for its eclectic array of courses, unique focus on modern and contemporary art, and openness to research involving gender and sexuality.

Lisa Stone, curator of the SAIC’s Roger Brown Study Collection, believes Loescher’s outspoken pride in his identity as a gay man was what made the SAIC “a place where gay, lesbian and transgender students could feel comfortable” long before most other schools. Loescher’s bawdy humor at first shocked students, then made them clamor for more of his classes: In an essay he wrote after Loescher’s death, Helguera recalls the professor pointing at a slide and saying, “Look at the butt of this Tula figure. What more evidence do you need that there were gay Toltecs?”

Loescher awed his colleagues and students with what Stone calls his “encyclopedic knowledge,” evident in his teaching and administration: Loescher, who had been the arts editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, ensured his department emphasized non-European cultures, and his own “art history” courses featured excursions into film, literature and Chicago’s finest restaurants. His former teaching assistant, Margo Handwerker, admits she was so put off by this approach that she nicknamed him “Multiculti”—until she had an “awakening” in Loescher’s graduate course on Spanish art. “I was clueless about how the art of Spain was a reflection of its culture,” she observes; Loescher taught her never to isolate art from its context. Another former graduate student, Ross Elfline, said via e-mail,“[Bob’s] ability to make connections across eons and great distances, while perhaps dubious at times, [was] the product of a curious and probing approach to the history of visual culture…. I wish I could sit down and pick his brain some more.”

¡Oye! Life Is a Feast will be held at the Gene Siskel Film Center from 8:30am–5pm on Friday 4. Richard F.Townsend, chair of the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of African and Amerindian Art, will give the keynote address.