Ralph Arnold (1928–2006) was a mixed-media and collage artist, born in Chicago and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. Arnold’s work often grappled with media portrayals of gender, race, sexuality and politics. He briefly attended the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign before enlisting in the military from 1950-1952, during the Korean War. He returned to Chicago after the war, and completed his degree at Roosevelt University, before getting his MFA at the School of the Art Institute. During this time he met his life partner, William Frederick, who was a silversmith and a teacher at SAIC. Arnold became involved with the South Side Community Art Center in 1966, and had many group and individual exhibitions at the Center over the decades. He worked as a professor at Rockford University, Barat College, and SAIC, before joining the Fine Arts Department at Loyola University. Loyola University named the Ralph Arnold Fine Arts Annex and Ralph Arnold Gallery after the artist, who served as Department Chair and remained on faculty until 2000. Arnold’s work is in multiple museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2018, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago held a retrospective of Arnold’s work, The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold.