Joe Coleman (painter)
[15] Taken as a whole, Joe Coleman's body of paintings presents an ongoing exegesis of his life, influences, obsessions, family and friends with a particular focus on the pathological and the psychological, the sacred and the profane, pop culture and high art, and the inter-relations between them.
He has painted portraits of a broad range of figures, both historical and contemporary, that include saints and sinners, writers (Edgar Allan Poe, Hunter S Thompson, Louis-Ferdinand Celine), artists (George Grosz, Adolf Wolfli), madmen (Charles Manson), actors (Leo Gorcey, Jayne Mansfield), murderers (Ed Gein, Mary Bell, Albert Fish), musicians (Hasil Adkins, Hank Williams, Captain Beefheart), visionaries, freaks (Johnny Eck, Joseph Merrick a.k.a.
He has also painted portraits of obscure or controversial figures in American history (Boston Corbett; abolitionist John Brown; Swift Runner, a Cree Indian in the thrall of Wendigo psychosis).
Over the years, he has also painted portraits of many of his closest friends, including tattoo artist, writer, and painter Jonathan Shaw, and motorcycle builder and stunt rider Indian Larry.
[1][5][7][8][17] The first exhibitions of Coleman's paintings were held at Lower East Side and Soho art galleries, Wooster, Chronocide, Limbo and Civilian Warfare, in 1986 and 1987.
Victoria and Albert Museum curator David Owsley, whom Coleman had met after picking him up his cab, bought a piece from one of his shows at Chronicide and hung it next to a Breughel in his collection.
Owsley would also introduce Coleman to Mickey Cartin, who became the biggest collector of his work and convinced him to stop driving a cab and devote himself to painting full-time.
In the late ’80s and early ‘90s, Coleman had solo shows at Psychedelic Solution in Greenwich Village and Billy Shire's gallery, La Luz de Jesus, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
Among those who saw it were French journalist Clement Dirie who arranged for the show to travel to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in March 2007, and German curator Susanne Pfeffer, who invited Coleman to exhibit at the K-W Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin[2][21][22] and commissioned David Woodard to pen an essay for the accompanying catalog.
Musician, actor, and outsider artist Bruno S., the star of Werner Herzog's Stroszek, was personally invited by Coleman to play the dinner following the exhibition's public vernissage.
They are surrounded on either side by friends and family who attended their wedding at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, while their symbolizing enemies are pitching into the fires of hell below them.
[1][27][28] The two paintings also formed the center-piece of another large retrospective of Coleman's work, entitled ''Doorway to Joe'', held in 2017 at the Begovitch Gallery, California State University, Fullerton.
[29][30] In the late 1970s Coleman developed a carnival geek/ mad preacher persona for his early performances called Professor Mombooze-o—a name that was an amalgamation of his mother (‘Mom’) and father (‘Booze-0’).
Professor Mombooze-o, who was depicted in a 1986 painting, would appear in performance spaces in NY's Lower East Side and, while ranting as a madman preacher, would bite the heads off of live mice and explode on stage.
[38][39][40][41][42] Alongside his performance art, Joe Coleman has also appeared as an occasional actor, often playing the kind of misfits, outsiders, monsters and murderers who populate his paintings.
In the early 1980s while attending the School of Visual Arts, he contributed to several avant-garde films by Manuel DeLanda, as a writer and actor, including Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches and Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller.
playing a serial killer in Jeri Cain Rossi's 1992 short film, Black Hearts Bleed Red, an adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's short story A Good Man Is Hard To Find, and Satan (to Sid Vicious bodyguard Rockets Redglare's portrayal of Jesus) in Tommy Turner and David Wojnarowicz's Where Evil Dwells, based on the 1984 murder of Ricky Kasso.
[55] In 2016 Coleman appeared as the title character in The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man, alongside contemporary sideshow and burlesque performers including Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz, directed by James Habacker, founder of New York City neo-burlesque venue, The Slipper Room.
A performance by Professor Mombooze-o was featured in Harvey Nikolai Keith's 1988 documentary Mondo New York, about the NYC underground art and music scene.
The first film called Humanscapes, was accompanied by the music of Carlo Gesualdo, Coleman's favorite medieval composer and performed by a live choir, The Clerk's Group.
