Mike Kelley worked with the materials most designers learn to look past: the felt banner in a school corridor, the crocheted blanket at a yard sale, the hand-sewn doll, the class photo, the foam-board model. He collected, sewed, photographed and rebuilt them, turning the look of amateur craft and institutional decoration into a precise visual vocabulary that anyone working with type, textiles, packaging or space can learn from.
A note on images: none of the Mike Kelley works held by the Art Institute of Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum of Art is flagged public domain, and the Cleveland Museum of Art has none by him, so this guide describes his work in text only. For textiles that are cleared for reuse, browse the textile collection in the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Mike Kelley?
Kelley was born on 27 October 1954, according to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s artist record. The Broad gives Detroit as his birthplace, while other biographies name Wayne, Michigan, a suburb of the city; both agree he grew up in the Detroit area. He studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then at the California Institute of the Arts, where he took his MFA in 1978. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s research pages name Douglas Huebler among his teachers there, and several accounts add John Baldessari, whose text-and-image conceptualism is a useful companion to Kelley’s banners.
In 1973, while still an art student in Michigan, he formed the band Destroy All Monsters with Jim Shaw, Niagara and Cary Loren, according to CalArts. Music, performance and collaboration stayed part of his practice for the rest of his life. He settled in Los Angeles and worked there until his death in early 2012; the Whitney records the date as about 31 January 2012.
A career in key works
Felt banners, mid-1980s. Tate’s exhibition guide for Ghost and Spirit describes his earliest well-known works as felt banners like those hung in churches and schools, but carrying slogans that undercut their usual uplifting message. A 2008 show reviewed by Art21 gathered banner works from 1985 to 1993, large wall hangings of glued and sewn felt.
More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987. The Whitney holds this work: stuffed fabric toys and afghans on canvas with dried corn, paired with wax candles on a wood and metal base, roughly 3 by 3.9 metres. It was first shown at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles.
Pay for Your Pleasure, 1988. Made for a show at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, it lines a corridor with floor-to-ceiling banners, each carrying the portrait of a well-known writer, philosopher, politician or artist. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which owns it, counts 42 banners; other accounts give 43.
Toy sculptures, 1989–90. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Eviscerated Corpse (1989), made from found stuffed cloth toys, and Yarn #6 (1990), a blanket worked with yarn.
Ahh…Youth!, 1991. A set of silver dye bleach prints in the Met’s collection: thrift-store yarn dolls and stuffed animals photographed one by one in the format of yearbook portraits, alongside a school photo of the artist. The Met notes that the series became widely recognised through the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty, which uses one of the photographs.
Educational Complex, 1995. A large architectural model, built in white foam board, that combines every school he attended, as reviews of his retrospective describe it.
Kandors, 1999–2011. A long series based on Kandor, the shrunken city kept in a bell jar in the Superman comics. Kelley made glowing resin cities under glass, each lit like a display case.
Day Is Done, 2004–05. Built from 365 found high-school yearbook photographs of performances and school rituals, which Kelley restaged as videos and installations. Gagosian showed the full project in New York in 2005.
Mobile Homestead, opened 2013. A full-size replica of his childhood home in Westland, Michigan, on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It opened on 11 May 2013, and is described as his final public project.
What to look at in a Mike Kelley work
The look of the noticeboard. The felt banners borrow the cut-out letters, bright flat felt and simple emblems of parish halls and classrooms. The type is the image. Because the format reads as friendly and earnest, any slogan set in it lands with extra force.
Colour from the thrift shop. The blanket and toy works are dense with the colours of 1970s acrylic yarn: orange, avocado, mustard, brown and pink, crowded together. He did not choose a palette so much as inherit one, and the clash is part of the meaning.
Grids and lineups. Ahh…Youth! sets each toy in a single frame, head and shoulders, against a plain ground, like a page of a yearbook. The repeated format turns a heap of odd objects into a cast of characters.
The model as drawing. In Educational Complex the white foam board strips colour and texture away, so the plan of the buildings becomes the subject.
Light as packaging. The Kandors cities glow in tinted resin under bell jars, which turns each one into a precious object on a plinth. The display method is as designed as the object.
Mike Kelley’s technique: collecting, sewing and rebuilding
- Found materials. He bought handmade toys, afghans and blankets from thrift stores and yard sales and used them whole, stitched onto canvas or laid on the floor.
- Felt and appliqué. The banners are glued and sewn felt, the same technique used for church and school banners, so the craft method itself carries the reference.
- Archives as source. Day Is Done started from hundreds of found yearbook pictures; Kandors started from comic-book panels. He mined printed ephemera the way a designer builds a mood board.
- Collaboration. From Destroy All Monsters onward he worked with musicians, performers and other artists, and he made record artwork for friends, the Dirty cover among it.
How designers can borrow Mike Kelley’s ideas
- Use a vernacular format on purpose. A felt banner, a church bulletin or a school pennant comes with ready-made associations. Choose the format for what it says, then decide whether your message agrees with it or pushes against it.
- Let the type be the picture. Cut-out letters in two or three flat colours can carry a whole poster or wall graphic. Our guide to poster design principles covers the hierarchy that keeps big, simple lettering readable.
- Inherit a palette. Photograph a pile of second-hand textiles and pull colours from it rather than building a scheme from scratch. Our image colour picker extracts a palette from your own photo.
- Put odd things in a uniform grid. A consistent crop, background and light can make a varied product range, team or collection read as one set, just as the yearbook format does in Ahh…Youth!
For another artist who treated posters, books and stationery as part of the work, see our guide to Martin Kippenberger. Kelley’s banners, sculptures, photographs and videos are in copyright, so borrow his methods and make your own material.
Where to see Mike Kelley’s work
The Whitney Museum of American Art holds More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, holds Pay for Your Pleasure; the Art Institute of Chicago holds Eviscerated Corpse and Yarn #6; and the Met holds Ahh…Youth! and the sculpture Hibernating Egg: Postoperative State (1994). Mobile Homestead stands at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
A retrospective opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in December 2012 and travelled to the Centre Pompidou, MoMA PS1 (October 2013 to February 2014) and MOCA Los Angeles. A second survey, Ghost and Spirit, opened at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris in October 2023 and travelled to K21 in Düsseldorf, Tate Modern (3 October 2024 to 9 March 2025), billed as his first major UK exhibition, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Frequently asked questions
What is Mike Kelley known for?
He is known for felt banners, sculptures made from thrift-store stuffed toys and blankets, the Ahh…Youth! photographs, the architectural model Educational Complex (1995), the Kandors series and the Detroit project Mobile Homestead.
Did Mike Kelley design the Sonic Youth Dirty cover?
The cover of the 1992 album uses a photograph from his 1991 series Ahh…Youth!, a portrait of a crocheted stuffed toy. The Met, which holds the series, notes that the album made the images widely recognised.
Why did Mike Kelley use stuffed animals?
He used handmade toys and blankets bought second-hand because they carry the hours of care and the sentiment of the people who made them. The title More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987) points directly at that unpaid craft labour.
Can I use Mike Kelley’s work in my designs?
No. He died in 2012 and his works are in copyright. You can learn from his methods, such as using vernacular formats, inheriting palettes from found textiles and presenting objects in uniform grids, but create your own images.
