The artist was a self-described “blue-collar anarchist,” and cited Iggy Pop and Sun Ra among his primary influences. His impact has been widespread and profound and perhaps unexpected. Kelley’s subjects were marginalized figures — janitors, comic book characters, lonely teenagers. His work rested somewhere between conceptual art, pop culture and the foggy memories of his own working-class upbringing; he was attracted, he once said, to “places that the majority of men would close off as degraded and disgusting.”
The New York Times, “Mike Kelley’s Underground Afterlife”
