Jim Rinnert was the longtime art director for In These Times magazine and a theater enthusiast who co-wrote an award-winning multimedia theatrical work based on the writings of avant-grade theater and cinema artist Antonin Artaud.
Also an AIDS activist, Rinnert in 1985 created a fund to provide financial support for members of the Chicago theater community who had been affected by the AIDS crisis. That fund eventually was expanded to become Season of Concern Chicago, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to theater practitioners unable to work due to illness, injury or circumstance.
“He was the artist in our family, and we just loved him,” said his nephew, actor Randall Newsome. “He was generous … and he produced things.”
Rinnert, 80, died of a stroke suffered at Beacon Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana, on July 19, said his husband of 10 years, Brent Fisher. A former West Town resident who had moved to New Carlisle, Indiana, in 2022, Rinnert recently had been hospitalized for heart problems, Fisher said.
Born and raised in the southern Illinois town of Flora, James Hubert Rinnert attended Flora High School and then served in the Army at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War as a personnel specialist. He then earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Eastern Illinois University.
After college, Rinnert taught for a year in Australia, and had several jobs in Chicago, including working for the Kelley Girls employment service and cataloguing Hugh Hefner’s personal movie collection at Chicago’s Playboy Mansion, Fisher said.
In 1976, Rinnert joined In These Times, then a progressive startup publication, as a typesetter. He eventually became the publication’s art director and he also contributed articles to the publication.
“I was really impressed with his creativity,” said longtime In These Times senior editor Salim Muwakkil. “A lot of times you get the feeling that what a progressive publication is doing is kind of a freelance or less-technical orientation, and Jim was progressive-friendly but very competent, and that was welcome.”
Fisher said Rinnert loved to promote his view that art is 90% contemplation and 10% creativity when asked how long it took him to finish a piece of artwork.
“His artwork was often a creative reaction to something that personally and deeply affected him,” Fisher said.
Rinnert’s interest in theater dated to his time in college, and upon arriving in Chicago, he found himself drawn to the city’s grassroots, off-Loop theater scene. Rinnert’s partner at the time, Tommy Biscotto, had been a stage manager at the Organic and Goodman theaters.
In the late 1970s, Rinnert joined forces with Biscotto and a onetime college classmate, J. Pat Miller, to create “The Artaud Project,” a show based on the writings of French actor, writer, poet, playwright and visionary Artaud, who died in 1948. Artaud called his vision of theater the Theatre of Cruelty, which he described in essays as not sadism, but rather “a theater that wakes us up: nerves and heart.”
Rinnert wrote and directed the show, which starred Miller and was staged at the Victory Gardens Theater, then located at 3730 N. Clark St. in the Lakeview neighborhood. The Tribune’s theater critic in 1980, Richard Christiansen, in a review, gave Rinnert and several colleagues credit for the “technically sophisticated” show and called it “a compulsively watchable work that offers interested theater audiences the opportunity to experience a genuinely experimental piece.”
“The Artaud Project” won a Joseph Jefferson Award, Chicago’s top theater prize, in 1980.
Rinnert had a really inquisitive mind, said Mary Griswold, the production’s set designer. “The whole idea of ‘The Artaud Project,’ with the video at the same time, and devising it so that you as a spectator knew where to look — it was a complicated, intricate scheme of blending live-action and taped things with Artaud’s original material and other scripted material that Jim wrote,” she said.
Fisher said Rinnert was drawn to Artaud’s works and writings on theater. “But the motivation was creating a piece that would showcase J. Pat Miller, his close friend, as ideally as it did,” Fisher said.
After “The Artaud Project,” Rinnert continued to write, including several plays and a screenplay, though none were published or produced, Fisher said. At the time of his death, Rinnert had been collaborating on authoring a history of the Organic Theater Company, titled “Scream, Bleed, Take Off Your Clothes: Stuart Gordon and Chicago’s Organic Theater Company.”
Among the book’s coauthors include Griswold and actors Cordis Heard and Michael Saad.
“He was probably the best writer of all of us, so a lot of times he would blend together what others of us had written and do an editing job,” Griswold said.
Biscotto, Rinnert’s partner in the 1970s and ’80s, was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1982, at the start of a mysterious and growing health crisis largely affecting the gay community. Biscotto’s diagnosis preceded the creation of the term AIDS, and after Biscotto’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1984 and Miller’s death from an AIDS-related illness the following year, Rinnert helped form the Biscotto-Miller Fund, which was aimed at providing financial support to those in Chicago’s theater community affected by AIDS.
In 1987, Rinnert helped create Season of Concern Chicago, a nonprofit group that now provides financial assistance to the Chicago theater community. Season of Concern took over managing the Biscotto-Miller Fund.
Rinnert retired from In These Times around 2007.
Rinnert also is survived by a brother, Max.
A celebration of his life will take place 2-5 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 27 at the Vault Gallery, 2015 S. Laflin St., Chicago.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
