Mike Kelley was born
in Detroit, Michigan in 1954, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
He received a BFA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from
the California
Institute
of the Arts.
Kelley’s work ranges from highly symbolic and ritualistic
performance pieces, to arrangements of stuffed-animal sculptures,
to wall-sized drawings, to multi-room installations that restage
institutional environments (schools, offices, zoos), to extended
collaborations with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler,
and the band Sonic Youth. A critic and curator, Kelley writes for
art and music journals and has organized numerous exhibitions incorporating
his own work, work by fellow artists, and non-art objects that
exemplify aspects of nostalgia, the grotesque, and the uncanny.
His work questions the legitimacy of ‘normative’ values
and systems of authority, and attacks the sanctity of cultural
attitudes toward family, religion, sexuality, art history, and
education. He also comments on and undermines the legitimacy of
the concept of victim or trauma culture, which posits that almost
all behavior results from some form of repressed abuse. Kelley’s
ongoing pseudo-autobiographical project, “Extracurricular
Activity Projective Reconstruction,” begun in 1995, is a
planned compendium of 365 sculpture and video works, inspired by
mundane yearbook
photos and an examination of his own selective amnesia. Kelley’s
aesthetic mines the rich and often overlooked history of vernacular
art in America, and his practice borrows heavily from the confrontational,
politically conscious “by all means necessary” attitude
of punk music. Mike Kelley received the Skowhegan Medal in Mixed
Media and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Major solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris; and Kunsthalle, Basel, among others.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Mike Kelley's Web Site | Metro Pictures Gallery, New York |
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Mike Kelley on the Art21 blog |
