Artworks

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Joe Massey (1895 – ?)

The long-demolished Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus was the bleak outpost where Joe Massey’s story rose above what was, by all accounts, a dejected life. Whether in the past he pursued artistic endeavors is unclear, but only a few years into his Ohio incarceration, the pioneering surrealist magazine View—whose contributors included Picasso, Duchamp, Nabokov, and Sartre—began printing inmate no. 75209’s drawings and poems.

At some point in the early 1940s, Massey started sending letters and submissions, addressed to Charles Henri Ford (“Editor Sr”), to the View headquarters in New York City. Ford was surely intrigued and impressed with the radical otherness of Massey’s letters and creative output; they were windows to a world drastically unlike his own yet very much in tune with the spirit of the avant-garde.

In his drawings the dark cloud of Massey’s past has lifted and the sun shines with a smirk. With an absolute economy of means he created a visual lexicon that speaks with vigor and whimsy. The artist presents surreal visions as matters of fact; his everyday vignettes cast a dreamlike glow. The viewer is dropped into a kind of vaudeville that’s packed with action, motion, and emotion—and reinforced by Massey’s consistent use of words; a fragment of dialogue or a call and response between characters.

Massey’s life is a testimony of the unfathomable complexities of being human, but his art remains thrilling and irreducible—flourishing as much from seclusion as it did from exposure and a profound yearning to be heard.