Kevin Sullivan

Kevin Sullivan, American artist (born 1964), lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Education His early education was in California's public school system, including Homestead High School (Cupertino, California). A cartoonist for the Homestead Epitaph who was successful enough to eventually attend University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where his interest in the fine arts intensified and was encouraged by UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture professors Paul McCarthy and Don Suggs. McCarthy's support helped earn him UCLA's Clifton Webb Award for his achievement in performance art. Sullivan earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from UCLA in 1988. Background Performance art, painting and writing continue to be his primary pursuits. Since 1984, he has enacted approximately 24 documented performances and eight solo exhibitions, and has been included in several dozen group exhibitions throughout the United States and in Europe. Art critic David Pagel has noted Sullivan's focus on "the potential significance of mundane events and apparently unremarkable occurrences". His subjects are often the neglected and abused cultural achievements of the past. His projects include Towards an Ape Theatre (2016), old taco bells (2014), This is Bruxism (2000), The Revolutionist (1998), Residuum (1991) and The Diaries of Paul Varnac (1988). In 1990, he curated the exhibition Frontier Tales with Jan Tumlir for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) which included the work of Clive Barker, Russell Crotty, Sandy Hubshman, Daniel Johnston, Gina Lamb, Joan Mahony, Craig Stecyk and Kamar Uwais. He has published three artist books, and his critical writing on art, music and film has appeared in the magazines Dirt, Raygun, Visions, Xtra and the transfixion blogspot , often under the name Sidral Mundet (a brand of Mexican soda pop). Career During the early 1990s, Sullivan was represented by Sue Spaid Fine Art in Los Angeles and Jose Freire Fine Art in New York and had some measure of conventional success, primarily with the series Residuum : paintings based on old rock and roll album covers that focused on the materiality and artistic sophistication of those objects. The series earned the artist critical acclaim from numerous periodicals, including Art in America, The New York Times, The San Francisco Examiner and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as the active interest of several collectors and curators.