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Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum opens Mike Kelley. Homage

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum presents a special exhibition Mike Kelley. Homage, on view March 1 – March 11, 2012.

Michigan-born Mike Kelley, one of the most celebrated international contemporary artists, passed away at his home in California this January at age 58. Equipped with an arsenal of endless pop references, Kelley was known for his memory-suffused installations and multi-media works.

Often irreverent, always evocative of the deepest reaches of the human condition, Kelley will be remembered for his incomparable experimental imagination, exquisite and broadly-based craft, and emotionally-complicated investigations of love and loss.

For Mature Audiences

The Broad/MSU will present three videos:

Banana Man, 1983, a performative video based on a secondary character in a children’s television show.
Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, 1999. In what we might call a death foretold, Kelley here has the pop icon Superman recite poems by Sylvia Plath who, tragically, took her own life as did the artist.

Day Is Done, 2005-2006, Kelley’s magnum opus, is a kaleidoscopic multi-media, musical horror show, of sorts, filmed in a high school auditorium. With dozens of fully costumed characters (mimes, demons, hillbillies, starlets), the videos that comprise this compilation were originally placed within twenty-five installations in a phantasmagoric gallery exhibition.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum is the art museum of Michigan State University. Also an engaged public institution, The Broad is a contemporary museum devoted to the art of our time. Expressly dedicated to exploring contemporary culture and ideas through the probing gaze of artists, The Broad is a place where artists’ ideas, words, and actions create a vibrant center for questioning and understanding the modern world. – www.broadmuseum.msu.edu

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