A long-overdue survey of an essential West Coast artist whose humorous
works delve into America's underbelly and evolving counterculture. Over
the past thirty years, Jim Shaw has become one of America's most
visionary artists, moving between painting, sculpture, and drawings,
while building connections between his own psyche and the larger
political, social, and spiritual history of America. Shaw's imagery is
mined from comic books, record covers, conspiracy magazines, obscure
religious pamphlets, and other cultural refuse to produce a portrait of
the American subconscious out of his personal obsessions.
Shaw, along with fellow Michigan native Mike Kelley, moved to California
in the 1970s to attend Cal Arts and was one of a number of notable
artists to emerge from the school in the early 1980s. Shaw's work is
distinguished by rigorous formal and structural analyses of neglected
forms of vernacular culture. Accompanying a major exhibition, this is
the first major monograph devoted to the entirety of the artist's
unique, multifaceted career.