Little City by Harold Jeffries, Courtesy of Little City Center for the Arts
Beyond Influence features 11 artists, who over the past 20 years, have been creating work at the Little City Center for the Arts (Little City) in Palatine, Illinois. Included are pieces from artists who have exhibited both nationally and internationally, including Harold Jeffries, Tarik Echols, and Wayne Mazurek. The broad scope of work being created by these artists ranges from paintings to multimedia collages.
For more than 20 years, Little City has operated under the belief that people with developmental disabilities can have full opportunities in the arts. The artists working there comprise a diverse group in gender, age, and race. Each brings a unique perspective and breadth of talents to the studio. Little City is a place where there are no constraints in ideas, mediums or possibilities. Each artists is encouraged to push the artistic envelope and strive for innovation. The eleven artists featured in this exhibition display that they are in fact “beyond influence” – that of the mainstream art world, other’s expectations, and their own limitations.
We know very little of C.T. McClusky’s biography except that he worked as a circus clown and spent some of his off seasons rooming at a boarding house in Oakland, California. It was there that he created a suitcase full of collages, populated with images cut from Life magazines and newspapers, that depicted daily life in a circus setting. Many of McClusky’s collages center around themes of travel, isolation and the circus as an extended family. He worked on shirt cardboard and in addition to photographic illustrations, used foil, crayon, string and cuttings from animal crackers boxes to bring his evocative images to life. 
