Photo: Rebecca M. Alvin
by Rebecca M. Alvin
The Joey Mars universe is a place of frenetic energy, mashups of old and new ideas, and a unique blend of influences and references from Jean-Michel Basquiat to R. Crumb, from Andy Warhol to William S. Burroughs with a little Jimi Hendrix on the side. And it’s been growing and expanding recently, thanks in large part to an Internet platform called Whatnot, which Mars refers to as “like the blue-collar Christie’s.”
For most of his career, the artist best known locally for having created the mural on Shop Therapy but more broadly in the world of rock posters and t-shirts for bands like Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, and others, was still holding down side jobs as a cook. And then a new wave of Mars fans, many of them 20 or more years younger than him, began collecting his work through auctions of his vintage pieces on Whatnot, a platform that combines social media live-streaming elements with bidding, mostly on vintage items. Mars got in at a time where he wasn’t even able to afford stickers of his artwork to leave at galleries and shops. Instead, he took postal forms, like priority mail labels and created drawings and collages on them that he would leave around. But after Whatnot, Mars found himself in a new world, one where whatever work he put up—whether shirts or hats or stickers or paintings on canvas, there were buyers, sometimes paying $1,000 for a shirt that originally sold for $15.
It was through this network of Joey Mars fans near and far that the idea for Mars Fest came about. The event, which will be held this year at Rugosa Gallery, on Route 6, in Eastham is a three-day celebration of Mars, featuring art and performance and giveaways and live music, classes, and lots of Mars merch, starting this Friday. Last year, Mars was approached by two fans from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who said they wanted to come to the Cape and take Mars and his wife out deep-sea fishing because they loved his work so much. Mars agreed. What started as two fans coming out to the Cape grew to include other Mars fanatics and collaborators, such as Foolio, a live-streamer who Mars likens to a “Mexican Dr. Phil.” The two worked together on a series of gorgeous tie-dye shirts in which Mars’ drawings are made within the waves of the tie-dye where he says he could “find the faces” that were already serendipitously there in the shirt, making it a truly collaborative work.
The trip to this point has been a long, strange one. Originally from what he calls “cow country” near Worcester, Mass., Joey Mars studied art in Boston and then found his way into the music world through his friend Chuck White. He designed posters for local bands and then for Aerosmith and Pearl Jam shows in Boston, all leading up to a career designing posters, shirts, hats, stickers, you name it. But Mars was always on a track toward art, even if he didn’t know it yet. At art school, he’d lived in an apartment on Newbury Street rented by the school he went to, the legendary Vesper George School of Art, just before it closed in his junior year and he had to transfer to the Art Institute of Boston. All the while, Mars’ work as a graphic designer for the music business was steadily building into a career.
Then, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, he went back to Worcester where he got involved with an artist group called Worcester Artists Group (WAG). He was working at a nightclub in the kitchen and one of the guys working there took him to WAG. “He’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go smoke a joint with my friend Frank.’” Mars recalls. “And Worcester Arts Group was 10,000 square feet of old factory space with the super high ceilings, because it was built before electricity. So with all those giant windows, the frosted glass with the light, so they had 10,000 and we walked in, into this main area, this 5000 square foot sort of gallery performance area. And the place was just magical.. it was just art everywhere.”
Shortly after, he got an artist studio in the building and was surrounded by other artists in this environment that he likens to “the art Peace Corps,” because everyone was committed to keeping the group going with its non-juried shows that gave every artist the opportunity to show.
“I just got exposed to so much. And they would do like open stages on Wednesday night. I was there for three years, and I eventually became the president of the place, all because success and the way people went, but, you know, Fugazi played there. I was living there, so Fugazi played in my living room. Dinosaur Jr. played in my living room,” he recalls with delight.
From there he found his way out to Provincetown in 1996, where he worked for Ronnie Hazel (who he had collaborated with before) at Shop Therapy and lived in employee housing on Commercial Street. While his work was some of the best known in Provincetown and he already had a following for his merchandise, Mars says he wasn’t really in the gallery scene, even when he owned a few galleries here.
“Provincetown was my town,” he says, “but I never went to a Beachcomber thing.”
The people who gravitated toward his work were not necessarily a part of that crowd and Mars continued to create in a kind of parallel universe where blue collar life and pop art converged outside the boundaries of the local art world. Mars didn’t really think about his work as something that could be sold on its own, a canvas with his art on it, as opposed to the clothing and rock poster designs that had made his career.
Photos: Rebecca M. Alvin
And then he saw the 1996 Julian Schnabel film Basquiat, a watershed moment for him. “That changed my life,” he says. “Okay, so that’s mid 90s… I’d been a graphic designer forever… I’d go for these really tight, tight lines and stuff. But it’s very, very tight and that’s so different than the original whip of the sketch. So I discovered Basquiat’s work, and it’s that flow of consciousness thing. It’s just, you keep everything, or you cover it, or whatever, but you just do it. You want to paint this, let it come out of your head. And that was kind of a new concept for me, even though that’s kind of what I’ve always done. But as far as, like, oh, we’re gonna call this fine art? That’s what it looks like where I clean my airbrush out on the cloth in between colors.”
He explains that he always kept his cloths, which had not only the remnants from cleaning the airbrushes, but also little doodles and ideas. “I always liked them. I always kept them. So, I see that in my mind. I see the Basquiat movie. I go immediately to that cloth. I go, ‘I get to call that art. That’s art!’”
Mars says he became a “Basquiat fanatic,” and that the influence can be seen in his work following that, in the looseness of the line, the presence of that initial energy and gesture. He started experimenting with work that was a bit different from what people were used to and he met resistance to it, but he stuck with it and eventually it’s become part of his style. “I felt there was so much to his work that was healing. Like I got healed by looking at a lot of Basquiat, by drawing a lot about it, there’s something about his movements. And I think he’s one of the best colorists of the [20th century],” Mars explains. “I love this, this creative motion of, just keep drawing and drawing and drawing, you know, and some of that original whip is going to be in there in the end, where, in this, as much as I loved it, you know, by the time you do your sketches and your re-sketches, tracing this, and your commitment, you were so far away from that initial zip.”
Mars’ work has countercultural roots that interweave with pop art, street art, and the more mysterious, almost mystical world of aliens, conspiracies, and psychedelics. Although he has many fans who are his contemporaries, the 60-year-old artist marvels at the realization that his art appeals to a lot people much younger than him, people who were still children in the ‘90s.
The moment everything kind of went haywire (in the best way possible) was in 2018 when rapper Travis Scott was photographed wearing a Joey Mars t-shirt, one that is now worth at least twenty times what it originally sold for because of that photograph. This unexpected publicity teamed up with the Whatnot platform and Mars’ significant talent to create a feeding frenzy for all things Joey Mars.
“I have a posse now!” he says excitedly, a little bit bewildered by the buzz surrounding him at this particular moment with fans shaking when they meet him and obsessively outbidding each other on even the smallest drawings or hats seen in the background of his livestream on Whatnot. He’s been in the arts long enough to understand the ebb and flow, long enough to understand that you might as well do what you want and just stay with it instead of always thinking everything through and trying to predict where you’ll end up. “If it’s good and you keep doing it, it will happen” he says. “It’s happening.”
Mars Fest happens Friday through Sunday, September 13 – 15 at Rugosa Gallery, 4100 Rte. 6, Eastham. All events are free and open to the public, however, classes require advance registration. Parking on site. For more information visit rugosagallery.com. For more information about Joey Mars visit joeymars.com.
