Category: Artist
Nationality: American
Last Year: 61
Three decades into a career known for dense multimedia installations articulating the anxieties deep within American culture, and with a profound pedagogical influence on recent art, Mike Kelley nevertheless remains a rogue, outsiderish presence. Projects like A Voyage of Growth and Discovery (2009), currently showing at Long Island’s SculptureCenter, don’t hurt: it’s a six-channel, two-and-a-half- hour video collaboration with artist Michael Smith, narrating an oversize baby’s traumatic life. Kelley, as his work has long attested, was once a punk from Ann Arbor, Michigan; he still is, somehow, as a fiftysomething represented by Gagosian. Quite a feat.