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A Memorial Exhibition of the art
of Danny Kerschen (1977-2024)
The show features a selection of Danny’s triplets (hand-dyed three-billed caps), an installation of his custom marching band uniforms and delicate graphite drawings of marching bands, and a large-scale projection of the video he edited in his last months, Dystopia LLC. Additionally, it will feature smaller found objects that were dear to him, graphics and ephemera related to his curatorial work and studies as DK Ultra, and photographic evidence of his earlier public sculptures, among other things.
This is not a retrospective, such a thing would be impossible given the site-specific, often guerrilla nature of much of Danny’s work. It is a shadow cast by a shape-shifting, multidimensional, dearly loved, sorely missed, person, artist, and activist.
His sculptures ranged from the visceral to nearly invisible forays into lab-like process, born of his deep interest in the properties of materials, often construction materials, and the things of this world that are hidden in plain sight, systems of control, means to an end, the foundations of building.
Many of the drawings exhibited here are delicate, committed to the power of negative space, but he made numerous series of grotesque satirical cartoons of reactionaries over the years. His color sensitive pigment-and-dye paintings arise from an artistic ethos of chance and precision.
Danny’s idea of public art didn’t involve commissions or permits, and over the years he contributed sculptures to the places in which he lived, gargantuan sawhorse traffic blockers, abandoned lots festooned with utility flags arranged by color, door bell systems, among other interventions.
Danny kept many notebooks full of plans, narratives, sketches, jokes, and invectives against a capitalist system that hurts so many people. He was an organic intellectual, a reader, a thinker, working class and progressive. He was also a wanderer. He had a notebook of the bus trip to D.C. and New York a few months after high school, when he fell in with other punks and skaters and, by way of survival, appeared on an episode of NYPD Blue. Years later, after college, he kept a notebook of the bicycle trip he took from Chicago to the West Coast, a trip which included crossing the high plains of North America and ended when he was nearly killed by a shotgun blast at close range in an unexplained drive-by in Oakland, California.
In another notebook, Danny outlined his artistic education. His father was an oil field worker, a roughneck and driller, and Danny said his first teacher was the oil crisis of the 1980s which ran his father out of a job, like so many others, and his family out of a place to live, like so many others. The next step in his artistic development he credits to his time hanging around the offices of Jim Harithas in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then, he fast-forwards to his time in Germany, earning an MFA from the Stadelschule in Frankfort, Germany.
Before that, he co-founded the Bill Hicks Resurrection Laboratories, an anarchist hub and workshop space. He spoke often and with love of his time at Workshop Houston, mentoring kids and teaching them how to weld. He exhibited his work internationally, worked as an art conservator, and a preparator for SFO exhibitions, Danny never stood on ceremony. He mocked it, like anything pompous and backwards looking. Family lore has it that when his mother took his family to the Vatican to see the pope, little Danny pissed the pew. The title of this exhibition comes from a page in a notebook Danny had been keeping in the months before his death in January 2024. His cancer was aggressive and torturous, but not enough to keep him from thinking, making work, telling jokes, traveling, being present in the world in every sense.
Danny was never an escapist; he was an activist. His values were those of solidarity, mutual aid, family– born or chosen, social justice, and bright utopian promise. A dream, to him, was a blueprint for a better world.
This is not a retrospective, such a thing would be impossible given the site-specific, often guerrilla nature of much of Danny’s work. It is a shadow cast by a shape-shifting, multidimensional, dearly loved, sorely missed, person, artist, and activist.
His sculptures ranged from the visceral to nearly invisible forays into lab-like process, born of his deep interest in the properties of materials, often construction materials, and the things of this world that are hidden in plain sight, systems of control, means to an end, the foundations of building.
Many of the drawings exhibited here are delicate, committed to the power of negative space, but he made numerous series of grotesque satirical cartoons of reactionaries over the years. His color sensitive pigment-and-dye paintings arise from an artistic ethos of chance and precision.
Danny’s idea of public art didn’t involve commissions or permits, and over the years he contributed sculptures to the places in which he lived, gargantuan sawhorse traffic blockers, abandoned lots festooned with utility flags arranged by color, door bell systems, among other interventions.
Danny kept many notebooks full of plans, narratives, sketches, jokes, and invectives against a capitalist system that hurts so many people. He was an organic intellectual, a reader, a thinker, working class and progressive. He was also a wanderer. He had a notebook of the bus trip to D.C. and New York a few months after high school, when he fell in with other punks and skaters and, by way of survival, appeared on an episode of NYPD Blue. Years later, after college, he kept a notebook of the bicycle trip he took from Chicago to the West Coast, a trip which included crossing the high plains of North America and ended when he was nearly killed by a shotgun blast at close range in an unexplained drive-by in Oakland, California.
In another notebook, Danny outlined his artistic education. His father was an oil field worker, a roughneck and driller, and Danny said his first teacher was the oil crisis of the 1980s which ran his father out of a job, like so many others, and his family out of a place to live, like so many others. The next step in his artistic development he credits to his time hanging around the offices of Jim Harithas in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then, he fast-forwards to his time in Germany, earning an MFA from the Stadelschule in Frankfort, Germany.
Before that, he co-founded the Bill Hicks Resurrection Laboratories, an anarchist hub and workshop space. He spoke often and with love of his time at Workshop Houston, mentoring kids and teaching them how to weld. He exhibited his work internationally, worked as an art conservator, and a preparator for SFO exhibitions, Danny never stood on ceremony. He mocked it, like anything pompous and backwards looking. Family lore has it that when his mother took his family to the Vatican to see the pope, little Danny pissed the pew. The title of this exhibition comes from a page in a notebook Danny had been keeping in the months before his death in January 2024. His cancer was aggressive and torturous, but not enough to keep him from thinking, making work, telling jokes, traveling, being present in the world in every sense.
Danny was never an escapist; he was an activist. His values were those of solidarity, mutual aid, family– born or chosen, social justice, and bright utopian promise. A dream, to him, was a blueprint for a better world.
This exhibition was organized by Tex Kerschen with the help of Eric Schnell, Sallie Barbee, Dan Schmahl, and everyone at the Galveston Artist Residency. It includes works on loan from Danny Kerschen’s widow, Paula Ropero, as well as the Kerschen family.
The exhibition’s three public receptions, August 9, September 13, and October 11 will feature original music programming.