Michael Scoggins

“The work I make is always political,” says Michael Scoggins, who lampoons American and art-world politics and provincialism in trenchant, disarming schoolboy-style doodles and writings. He began, as he describes, as “a painters’ painter,” invested in the materials and processes of his medium and convinced that paintings should speak for themselves. Ultimately feeling blocked by this early work, he revisited his adult and childhood notebooks and hit upon the approach he has been following ever since. On large-scale sheets of paper that he cuts, creases, crumples, and rules with lines to look exactly like notebook pages, he sketches, makes notes, and writes essays in a naïve, childlike hand. Scoggins presents each piece as if it is an assignment, dutifully writing his name, “Michael S.,” and the date next to drawings of superheroes, dead presidents, and phrases like, “Pinko, Commie, Art.”