Hanging on the first floor gallery, a variety of quilt work, photography, digital art, ceramics, fossil work, and metal work, is the “Lost and Found” faculty gallery show. This show was open to both the art department, and any other faculty members in the school. For Woodworking and Craft Design teacher Nick Rupard, his contribution for the exhibit was a collection of photos he has owned for over 10 years.

Inside the woodworking room, boxes of black and white photos are hidden in the corner. Within each photo a new vivid scene emerges– from former Mayor Daley attending a rally in Chicago to performers in wild costumes, each picture tells a new story. As the pile of photos packed away in boxes deepens, more and more of the glossy photos appear.

When Rupard first moved to Chicago, he lived in an apartment in Boystown just near the Triangle Camera store. “I lived there for three or four years, and during that time the camera store went out of business,” Rupard said. “They were just throwing things away.”

One rainy evening, as Rupard left his apartment to throw his garbage away, he found many of the materials that Triangle Camera had left in a dumpster. As it turns out, Triangle Camera was a family- owned business. The owner of the store, from about the mid 60’s to his death when the store closed, was an AP photographer. “Basically anyone who was anyone at the time– sports, politics, entertainment,” Rupard said, “he took their picture an just took copies of them.”

On that rainy evening, Rupard found and original collection of old photos taken by the owner of Triangle Camera. “I opened a dumpster and there was a picture of The Beatles right there in a box,” Rupard said. “I just took it upstairs, and I was rummaging through it– it was like a goldmine.”

For the faculty art display, Rupard selected a collection of these photos to show the school. “What’s hanging up is just thirty of a couple thousand,” Rupard said. “The first time I was ever to really spread them out was at the beginning of the school year. I laid them out on the table, and I showed them to a lot of people. A lot of the faculty here looked at them, and they knew people in the pictures.”

For Rupard’s gallery display, there was no particular reasoning his choosing from any of the thousands of photos. “We could have covered the whole gallery with pictures,” Rupard said. “Really we just pulled maybe 100 of them, and then from there we just started hanging them up until we ran out of space.”

Even though Rupard found these photos over 10 years ago, it was the rediscovery of the photos that actually inspired the faculty art show. “Last year Mr. Rupard, said. “‘Wow! I just went through my garbage, and I found all those photographs,’’ Head of the Art Department Chris Turner said, ‘We started laughing about how kneat that was to find things, and so we thought that would be a great show.”

After five years of not putting on faculty-sponsored shows, the art department had planned on creating a partnership, this spring and summer, with a group called Ragdale. According to the Ragdale website, they provide, “Creative professionals of the highest caliber and an inspiring, supportive environment where they can produce enduring, inventive works.”

When the partnership with Ragdale fell through due to a scheduling conflict, Turner gravitated towards a faculty show for the school to see on the first day of school. “That’s the hardest show to fill because we certainly don’t have student work,” Turner said, “and it’s sort of a challenge to get other people to come before school starts.”

The theme of  “Lost and Found” came from this process. “I had a show, I lost a show,” Turner said, “and then I needed to find a show.”  After asking faculty members if they had art in the show, a collection emerged.

Art teacher Caroline Gardner was one of the many faculty members that contributed to the art show. “I started at the beginning of last year a quilt of Chicago and I wanted to sew all the major streets and side streets of Chicago,” Gardner said. “I spent the whole year making it and then put it in the show.”

Coincidentally, Gardner’s quilt actually fit with the “lost and found” theme for the faculty art show. “It worked out really well cause it’s a map,” Gardner said. “It just happened to work out like that, which was nice.”

Through her love of maps, geography, and fiber arts, Gardner was able to find a project that involved all three. And in high school fiber arts class, Gardner was able to experiment with indigo ink to capture the color of Lake Michigan.

Gardner felt the art gallery as a whole opened up a space where anyone could feel comfortable displaying their work. “The theme helped give people a little guidance, but then I think people interpreted it really widely,” Gardner said. “It turned into more of what people wanted to show, but it helps to give people a theme.”