"A DOORWAY TO JOE: The Art of Joe Coleman"– Joe Coleman in Person!

Please join us for a special conversation onstage with one of the most unique and subversive artists, writers & performance artists of the past four decades, Joe Coleman, moderated by author and journalist Chris Campion. The two will be discussing Coleman’s acclaimed career and the retrospective book, A Doorway To Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman, which will be on-sale at PRS. Don’t miss this rare West Coast appearance by the artist Guillermo del Toro describes as “Mesmerizing and savage.”

Joe Coleman is a world-renowned painter, writer, and performer who has exhibited for five decades in major museums throughout the world. He was the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (1997), and lives with his wife Whitney Ward in New York. His performance work from the 1980s was some of the most radical of its time and can be seen in the films Mondo New York (1980) and Captured (2008). The book on extreme performance, Avant Garde from Below: Transgressive Performance from Iggy Pop to Joe Coleman and G.G. Allin by Clemens Marschall, explores Coleman’s influence during this pivotal period. An avid and passionate collector, Coleman’s “Odditorium” is a private museum where sideshow objects, wax figures, crime artifacts and works of religious devotion live together to form a dark mirror that reflects the alternative side of the American psyche. His work has been published in numerous books, prints and records.

Chris Campion is a British author, journalist, and ghostwriter, whose work has been published in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Telegraph, Rolling Stone, Bizarre, Vice, and other places. // chriscampion.com

About the book:

A Doorway to Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman - A comprehensive monograph of the artist Joe Coleman, the "walking ghost of old America." Possessed by the spirits that haunt a nation, Joe Coleman paints minutely-detailed portraits and tableaus that present a unique and intensely-personal vision of the world, both hellish and humanistic, seeking the universal in the visceral.

His canon of subjects, a compendium of the famous and the infamous, the dispossessed, the deviant, the damaged and the damned, includes historical figures, murderers, musicians, heretics, writers, artists, and other unshakeable non-conformists, whom the artist channels through paintings so vivid they seem to bear the spark of life. The meticulously-researched narratives contained in Coleman's work—which has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide, and exhibited alongside Hieronymous Bosch, Otto Dix, and George Grosz—also serve as an exegesis of the artist's own psyche and history, confronting trauma and celebrating his circle of intimates and acquaintances.

A Doorway To Joe spans five decades of Coleman's career as a painter and visual artist. The book includes reproductions of over 150 paintings, alongside the artist's own commentary and notes on the works, and fully-illustrated themed essays by leading art critics, writers, and artists that illuminate key aspects of his oeuvre. From his earliest work in underground comics, through his time with confrontational '70s NYC punk band Steel Tips, and explosive performances as his fearsome, carnival geek alter-ego Dr Mombooze-o. As a collector and curator of the Odditorium, Coleman's own private sideshow museum of artefacts that trace his personal obsessions with true crime, carnival culture, reliquaries and icons. The book also explores the enduring relationship with Coleman's wife and muse, Whitney Ward.

Featuring an introduction by musician Tom Waits, A Doorway To Joe offers the most complete collection of Coleman's work to date. A funhouse mirror of the world from this most extraordinary American artist.

Following the conversation, Joe Coleman will be available to sign copies of “A Doorway To Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman.”

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

ACCESSIBILITY

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Host or Publisher The Philosophical Research Society