Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley (1954–2012) was an American artist whose restless, genre-crossing work made him one of the defining figures of his generation. Based in Los Angeles, he moved freely among sculpture, installation, performance, video, drawing, sound, and writing, drawing his materials as readily from thrift stores and high-school yearbooks as from the history of art. His subjects were the overlooked underside of American life — class, adolescence, popular culture, religion, and repressed memory — handled with a mixture of humor, pathos, and unease that refused any tidy line between the sentimental and the grotesque.
Raised in a working-class Catholic family near Detroit, Kelley studied at the University of Michigan, where he co-founded the noise band Destroy All Monsters, before completing an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts under teachers including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler. He worked first in performance, but became widely known in the 1980s for sculptures made from worn stuffed animals, crocheted dolls, and afghan blankets gathered secondhand. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) massed such objects into a dense field that made visible the unrequited labor and affection bound up in handmade things. When critics read the soiled toys as evidence of childhood abuse, Kelley turned the misreading into method, building works such as Educational Complex (1995) — an architectural model of every school he had attended, with the forgotten parts left blank — around the era's preoccupation with repressed memory and institutional conditioning.
Kelley received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2006, and collaborated throughout his career with artists and musicians including Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and Sonic Youth. After his death in 2012, a major retrospective traveled from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to the Centre Pompidou, MoMA PS1, and MOCA in Los Angeles. His work remains a reference point for artists drawn to the charged remains of everyday American culture.
