John C. Welchman first wrote about Mike Kelley for the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, "Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-86." Currently Chair of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and Professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego, Welchman discusses some of the "big" questions raised by the late artist's extraordinary oeuvre, including class, religion, and sexuality.

A renowned Kelley scholar, Welchman authored the survey text for the Kelley monograph published by Phaidon in 1999, edited the three volumes of Kelley's collected writings and contributed to publications on The Uncanny and Day is Done as well as On the Beyond, a conversation with Kelley and Jim Shaw. He traces the emergence of questions touching on morality, gender-bending, impropriety, trauma and death to Kelley's early work in performance and discusses how they played out during Kelley's thirty-five year career in his soft animal works of the later 1980s, the installations of the 1990s and Kelley's musical gesamtkunstwerk Day Is Done (2004-10).

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954-2012) produced a body of deeply innovative work mining American popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions, which he set in relation to relentless self and social examinations, both dark and delirious. MIKE KELLEY, the largest exhibition of the artist's work to date, is on view at MOCA through July 28, 2014.

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