2012 WHITNEY BIENNIAL DEDICATED TO DETROIT-BORN ARTIST MIKE KELLEY

2012 WHITNEY BIENNIAL DEDICATED TO DETROIT-BORN ARTIST MIKE KELLEY

 

The recently deceased Mike Kelley is being honored at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, running  from March 1-May 27th in NYC. Three films are  shown which chronicle his most recent and last work, Mobile Homestead, a reconstruction of the house he grew up in Detroit, Michigan that was mounted on a flatbed an toured around the city. Unfortunately, the actual large-scale piece is currently in storage in Michigan, but there are plans to turn the piece into a permanent public art display near MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). Tragically last month Kelley committed suicide in Los Angeles where he had relocated to years ago, he was 57 years old.

Here is more on Mike Kelley:

Mike Kelley was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954. 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-size 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. Mike Kelley received the Skowhegan Medal in Mixed Media, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Major solo exhibitions include 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. Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles, where he passed away in February 2012. –PBS.org Biography
Kelley was also one of the original band members in the Detroit-based anti-rock group, Destroy All Monsters.
Check out more articles on Mike Kelley and the 2012 Whitney Biennial-

 

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