University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
In 1976 Mike Kelley received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Gallery of Mike Kelley
California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, California, United States
In 1978 Mike Kelley obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts.
Career
Gallery of Mike Kelley
1993
Los Angeles, California, United States
Portrait session with artist Mike Kelley in his studio with works in progress in Los Angeles, California in September 1993. Photo by Ann Summa
Gallery of Mike Kelley
1993
Los Angeles, California, United States
Portrait session with artist Mike Kelley in his studio with works in progress in Los Angeles, California in September 1993. Photo by Ann Summa
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2007
Hammer Museum, Westwood, California, United States
Director John Waters and artist Mike Kelley at the Gala In The Garden event at the Hammer Museum on October 14, 2007 in Westwood, California. Photo by Rebecca Sapp
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2011
Los Angeles, California, United States
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs at one of his studios, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2011
Los Angeles, California, United States
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs in the livingroom of the house that has been turned in to offices, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2011
Los Angeles, California, United States
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs at one of his studios, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2011
Los Angeles, California, United States
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs at one of his studios, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2011
Los Angeles, California, United States
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs in the library of the house that has been turned in to offices, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Gallery of Mike Kelley
2011
Los Angeles, California, United States
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs in the kitchen of the house that has been turned in to offices, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Hammer Museum, Westwood, California, United States
Director John Waters and artist Mike Kelley at the Gala In The Garden event at the Hammer Museum on October 14, 2007 in Westwood, California. Photo by Rebecca Sapp
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs in the livingroom of the house that has been turned in to offices, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs in the library of the house that has been turned in to offices, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Artist Mike Kelley poses for photographs in the kitchen of the house that has been turned in to offices, in Los Angeles, July 7, 2011. Photo by Ann Johansson
Mike Kelley was an American artist. He is regarded as one of the most influential members of the Conceptual Art movement.
Background
Mike Kelley was born on October 27, 1954 in Wayne, Michigan, United States, to a working class Roman Catholic family. His father was in charge of maintenance for a public school system and his mother was a cook in the executive dining room at Ford Motor Company. He had a brother, George.
Education
In 1973, while attending the University of Michigan, Mike Kelley co-founded an improv noise band called Destroy All Monsters, Kelley and fellow artist Jim Shaw quit the band three years later. In 1976 Mike Kelley received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from this university.
In 1978 he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). At CalArts, Kelley was especially drawn to performance art and craft media because each, in different ways, posed a challenge to the category, and accepted practices, of fine art.
Mike Kelley began creating multimedia installations that synthesized large-scale drawings and paintings, often incorporating his own writing, along with sculptures, videos (one was based on the television show "Captain Kangaroo"), and performances, often scatological and sadomasochistic in nature. By the mid-1980s, he was already gaining attention nationally and internationally. His career took off earlier in Europe than it did in the United States. He found enthusiastic audiences in France and Germany.
Kelley had a regular one-man exhibitions at Metro Pictures in Manhattan in 1982, and at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles the following year. 1992, in particular, proved to be a watershed year, marking the beginning of Kelley's career on the graduate teaching faculty at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he would remain a professor until 2007. In 2005, he had his first solo show at Gagosian gallery in New York City, which was representing him at his death. A retrospective, "Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes," appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993 and traveled to Los Angeles and Munich; a second retrospective appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 1997; and a third was at the Tate Liverpool in 2004.
In addition to his teaching and artistic practice, Kelley remained a prolific writer throughout his career, penning articles and essays on a wide range of subjects from art, film, and architecture to subcultural topics as various as Ufology and Mexican wrestling.
Throughout his career Kelley sought to understand the cultures around him from the bottom up, scouring yard sales and yearbooks for their cast-offs and leftovers. He mined popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions, which he set in relation to relentless self- and social examinations, by turns dark and delirious.
In more recent years, Kelley’s ambitions widened in conceptual scope and physical scale with Educational Complex (1995), the epic Day Is Done (2005), his Kandors series (2007-2012), and the posthumously completed public work Mobile Homestead (2006-2013), as he addressed architecture, institutions, and 'projective reconstruction" using the theory of repressed memory syndrome coupled with (pseudo-) biographic inquiry into his own aesthetic and various social formations.
In 2012, at the age of 57, Kelley committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, just as plans for his first major international retrospective were taking shape.
Dialogue 6 (an example of reflection or absorption)
1991
Unwashed Abstraction Nr. 2
1988
Peat Spade
1989
Double Figure (Hairy)
1990
Little Friend
2007
Satan's Nostrils, from Pansy Metal/Clovered Hoof
1989
Lenticular 10
2007
PINK AND GRAY
1991
Singing Stop Sign (Señalización de Pare Cantante)
1998
Memory Ware Flat #24
2001
Lenticular 5
2007
City 6/No.1
2008
Boy swag lamp
2005
City 5
2007
Politics
In his student time, Mike Kelley was an avid participant in both the politically far-left White Panther Party and the underground punk music scene.
Views
Mike Kelley encountered two teachers who would strongly influence his practice: the conceptual artist John Baldessari and the performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson. In 2008 he established The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
Quotations:
"We're surrounded by invisibility. That's what I think art can do - make things visible."
"I really think art's about representation. And I don't believe in nonobjective art; I don't think there's such a thing."
Interests
Artists
John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold, Douglas Huebler
Music & Bands
heavy metal music
Connections
Mike Kelley's ex-girlfriend was Trulee Grace Hall. Their relationship had ended a few months prior to his death.