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.

About The Author

Massimiliano Gioni is Artistic Director of the New Museum. Natalie Bell is Assistant Curator at the New Museum. Gary Carrion-Murayari is Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum. Dan Nadel is a writer and publisher based in Brooklyn.  Tony Oursler is an artist based in New York. Janet Sarbanes is a writer and Creative Writing Program Chair at the California Institute of the Arts. Peter Saul is an artist based in New York. Marc-Olivier Wahler is a curator, a critic, and Director of the Chalet Society in Paris. John Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego.