Mike Kelley was born is an American artist. Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954, Kelley obtained his BFA at the University of Michigan, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His art might be described as sundry, running the gamut from symbolic performance art to stuffed animal sculpture to large-scale drawings to installation works. He began as a member of a punk band, the founder of the Detroit group, Destroy All Monsters. His work reflects this: the artist continues to borrow heavily from punk culture, pop culture, and and write pieces for music journals. … (read more)

Mike Kelley was born is an American artist. Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954, Kelley obtained his BFA at the University of Michigan, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His art might be described as sundry, running the gamut from symbolic performance art to stuffed animal sculpture to large-scale drawings to installation works. He began as a member of a punk band, the founder of the Detroit group, Destroy All Monsters. His work reflects this: the artist continues to borrow heavily from punk culture, pop culture, and and write pieces for music journals.

“Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction,” the artist's semi-autobiographical work, compiles a collection of 365 sculpture and video works, driven by exploration of his own periodic amnesia and nostalgia for cliche yearbook photos and relics. This examination of personal memory and ritualized American folk rituals is a common theme in Kelley's work. In Day is Done, he created a series of videos of such common, ritualized performancees: "school plays, children's performances, Halloween, dress-up day at work," commenting on the threads of kitsch culture woven into small-town American life.

His work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows at Musée du Louvre, Paris (2006); Tate Liverpool (2004); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1993). He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Watch a video of Mike Kelley talking about his misinterpreted stuffed animal sculpture:

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