About

A native New Yorker, Thomas McKean has exhibited his drawings, constructions, and collages in such New York spaces as HQ Gallery, ZieharSmith; The Small Works Show; "Single Fare" at 224 Grand; Invisible Dog Art Center; Sloan Fine Art; and RH Gallery. Other venues have included The Augusta Savage Gallery, UMass, Amherst, Massachusetts; and William Turner Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia. His current work consists of collages and constructions made out of found materials, including the the New York City MetroCard, business cards, and all sorts of discarded items. His illustrations have appeared in The Nation and Food and Wine among other magazines. Also an author, his latest book, A Conversation with Ruth Pitter, was published by the HappenStance Press, Scotland. In addition, Thomas McKean performs as both a stand-up story-teller, with shows in such venues as The Bell House, and as a singer of original country music in bars around town.

Thomas McKean lives and works in New York City.

MetroCards

MetroCards. Usually we swipe them in a hurry as we pass through the turnstile, hoping we haven't missed the subway. Or dip them as we enter a bus, hoping there's still enough money on them to pay for the ride. But we barely notice them; they're as omnipresent and invisible as pigeons. I stopped to look at them one day and haven't looked back yet. In their limited palette, I've found an expanding world of images, colors, ideas. Mosaics, collages, portraits, abstracts, constructions, dioramas, combination drawing and collages, all these keep pouring forth from this little object, not much bigger than two by three inches. Some of the pieces are the exact size of a MetroCard; others cover large sheets of papers; still others are structures, made of perhaps a thousand MetroCards. Finding the cards to use is part of the experience. And perhaps because I'm from New York, and this is my world, without setting out to, I'm creating a world from one of its iconic symbols, taking apart and reassembling it, making it mine and sending it forth before the MetroCard itself vanishes from our lives.

Collages

Scraps of paper. Receipts, They blow by us on a windy sidewalk; they litter empty spaces in our city, the gardens, the courtyards. Omnipresent business cards, for locksmiths or movers or marijuana dispensaries, crammed hurriedly into doorways, fall to the ground and add color to our vestibules. Even at home, when we're busy or distracted, old newspapers and magazines and mail containing fliers, bills, half-read letters, pile up, almost when we're not looking. I do look, though, and collect and save, and in these discarded scraps find a palette and an expanding world of images, colors, ideas. 

Many of these pieces involve creating a grid, one foot square, drawn in pencil on white paper, divided into half-inch squares. Within these strict parameters (24 squares across, 24 down), I use found paper to create both images and messages, cutting each morsel of paper into a half-inch square, or two nestled triangles, filling up the grid, square by square. In a sense, each piece is a small quilt, yet a quilt delivering no comforting warmth. And not just a quilt, but also a piece of sculpture: many of the pieces are in bas relief. In a very literal sense, I am taking the garbage hurled at us in the election-haunted America, making order out of  it, and sending a message back.

Trash Drawings: Twenty-One Square Feet of Soil

It took a few years, but finally the City planted a tree in front of my building in the East Village. I decided the tree needed a garden to grow up and out of. It took a few trips to the Union Square Farmers’ Market but soon my garden was filling in nicely. But not just with flowers: receipts, coffee cups, candy wrappers, cigarette boxes, beer bottles, gallon jugs, saw blades, business cards, padlocks - you name it, I found it in my garden. Soon each piece of trash became the focus of a miniature pen and ink drawing - over 350 in all - a history of twenty-one square feet of New York: what people throw out or lose, stores that come and go, the scrawled address of a rendez-vous planned or thought better of, taxi rides begun or ended, a meal eaten, a blouse bought - lives lived with only scraps left behind as proof - pieces of evidence of a City where everything comes and goes - people, places, possessions - with twenty-one square feet of soil as witness.

Gloves

It took a while to notice how many of them there are – lost gloves and mittens on the sidewalks of New York. I did, though, and began collecting them, bringing them home to draw. I did this over the course of one calendar year - 1 January to 31 December - and by the time I was done, I'd finished over 180 drawings. Each drawing includes the date when and the location where the glove was found.

Who had designed these gloves, who had made them, sold them; who had selected, worn. . . and then lost them? Each glove or mitten tells a story, both of hurrying New Yorkers and one New Yorker who chose to memorialize them.

PRESS

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