Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Drawing, Painting, Sculpture
Website: johncasey.com
John Casey was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and drew creatures from early childhood. He earned a BFA (Honors) in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1988, where he met his wife, the artist Mary Kalin-Casey. He moved to the Bay Area in 1998 and lives in Oakland. Since 2009 he has kept a studio at Jack Knife Studios near Jack London Square.
Casey became a fixture of the Oakland gallery scene in the 2000s, showing regularly at Swarm Gallery and serving on the board of Oakland Art Murmur (2010–2011). He later served on the boards of NIAD Art Center in Richmond (2017–2018) and Rock Paper Scissors Collective in Oakland (2020–2023). He has had solo shows in Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Nashville, and three solo shows at Galerie Polaris in Paris. He has also shown in group exhibitions in Germany, including the traveling show Wow, What a Shit Show in 2025. Hi-Fructose and the Paris magazine Hey! have both run features on his work.
The East Bay Express named him Best Artist in its 2012 Best of the Bay issue. He was one of the artists in the Svane Family Foundation’s Ark '20/'21 program, won Fastest Car at the 2022 SFMOMA Soapbox Derby, and has been an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. His work is in the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, di Rosa in Napa, and the Artothèque de Caen in France.
Casey works in drawing, painting and sculpture, and describes his sculptures and paintings as basically drawings in different forms. His drawings are often made in pencil, with a mechanical eraser used to make subtractive marks. The work is mostly black and white, with a single accent color added for emotional emphasis. He deliberately makes “wrong way” marks to break his habits and leave room for discoveries.
His subjects are invented creatures and distorted figures: fictitious bodily deformities, skulls, teeth, bursting flowers, all-seeing eyes, oversized hands, and anthropomorphic animal characters that stand in for his own emotional states. Many of the portraits read as psychological self-portraits or as stand-ins for friends and neighbors. They mix absurdity and dark humor with an underlying tenderness, and some take on politics directly.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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