Kane County Board chair mourns death of husband
Kane County Board Chair Corinne Pierog is taking some time off after the death of her husband.
Robert J. Krawczyk, 71, died at the couple's home in Batavia on Wednesday night. At the time of his death, he was recovering after a recent seizure and subsequent surgery.
Services will be held at Yurs Funeral Home in St. Charles at a date and time yet to be determined by Pierog and her family, county officials said Thursday in a statement.
Pierog will be out of the office until the week of Feb. 8 while she mourns her husband.
Kane County Board Vice Chairman Ken Shepro, who is a Republican, will serve as chair during Pierog's absence. The full county board is not set to meet again until Feb. 9.
Pierog won election in November and became the first Democrat in recent history to take the reins of the board. She previously served on the St. Charles Unit District 303 school board.
Members of the Kane County Forest Preserve District, who also serve as county board members, had a moment of silence Thursday morning to remember Krawczyk during a committee meeting.
Krawczyk was a professor in the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He began his career with the university in 1988. The courses he taught recently included 3D animation and computer automated design programming.
His time at the school included a three-year stint as director of the art@IIT gallery. He was an artist, with a business called BitArtWorks, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In a 2003 interview with the Daily Herald about his artwork, Krawczyk described how he created a computer program that graphs points coming from math equations. By linking the points, in a sort of connect-the-dots fashion, a visual image comes to life.
"Some art is to provoke you, but then there is another set that's just interesting to look at and visually it's attractive," Krawczyk said at the time. "In my world, that's what we go for."
His most recent post on LinkedIn said his artwork had been accepted for the 2021 Joint Mathematics Meetings Art Gallery on display last month. In October, he displayed a piece called "The Three Faces of Dr. Antony Fauci," first name intentionally spelled that way, at the Water Street Studios in Batavia. Krawczyk was also a longtime member of Chicago Sculpture International.
According to his curriculum vitae, he was an expert in digital art based on mathematical relationships or scientific concepts, including fractals, chaos, strange attractors and music. His work, available through his bitartworks.com website, was also sold at the Illinois Artisans shop at the Thompson Center in Chicago, and at a Santa Fe gallery.