Johnny Does a Christo (2026)
Forty years ago, an artist was born. Not just any artist, but a fully formed artistic identity, with an official artist name, and a sense of humor. Imagine the conceptual lovechild of two art dads: Marcel Duchamp and John Baldessari. That weird pair might explain the birth of “Johnny Naugahyde” on June 11, 1986 — announced via postcard mailed to one’s mundane self from a Wisconsin post office.
Marcel Duchamp had his Rrose Sélavy pseudonym for a hot minute in the 1920s (that’s right, with double Dada R’s). But this artist spawn called Johnny Naugahyde has stuck it out for four decades, cutting, carving, sewing and mailing out an art practice, possibly as an illegitimate half-brother of Banksy and Maurizio Cattelan. One thing’s for sure, “Naugahyde” is synthetic leather, a quintessential 20th- century textile. Interesting choice to cloak oneself in!
Naugahyde’s earliest artistic impulses were sketches for sculptures, along the lines of American sculptor and Emporia, Kansas, native, Wendell Castle. Johnny’s last studio art class was in high school, so he continued his autodidactic art practice supported by a heavy dose of academic art history. He experimented widely, however, and gravitated to the material immediacy of collage, printmaking and the relational qualities of mail art, which he continues to this day.
In 1994 Johnny cast his artistic fortunes by moving to Kansas City, where he’s been growing ever since. The alter ego of Johnny Naugahyde has provided a platform for infinite narrative possibilities over the years. The artist typically laces a textual component into his work in the form of pithy captions or cryptic she/he non sequiturs that revel in mysterious readings. “He was a bit distracted.” You think? As a post-post-modern pop pimp, Johnny coolly knows that all art is really about other art.
An obvious time traveler, Naugahyde fancies himself in conversation with artist colleagues dead and alive, sometimes with cats and dogs. This has resulted in multiple bodies of work including a series of tributes like “Johnny Does a Christo.” Imaginary text exchanges with tragic figures like Ana Mendieta and Mark Rothko edge toward macabre humor. Engaging with a collage of media: photography, writing, drawing, printmaking and textiles, Johnny found himself exhibiting at pioneering venues like Dolphin Gallery and Kansas City Artists Coalition back in the ’90s.
The artist threaded his offbeat practice through an incredible period of growth and evolution of the Kansas City art scene. Johnny’s work has been a fixture in annual group exhibitions such as the Kansas City Flatfile at the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace (formerly Block Artspace), but his work has popped up in Wichita and Warrensburg, St. Joseph and St. Louis, Madison and Milwaukee. The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art gave him a full retrospective in 2008; incredibly, everything the artist had made fit into one gallery.
Maybe that’s because Naugahyde is a mile wide. Dude wrote a novella, made short films, and turns up periodically in local opera productions as a non-singing extra. Not that you’d ever know. Case in point, “Woodland Adventure” is a three-year installation practically hidden on private property in the Wisconsin woods. If you were to ask nicely, Johnny might just give you the coordinates for a visit.
Just don’t ask his identity like poor ol’ Banksy. Let him enjoy his anonymity, his spray paint fumes, fishnet and philately fascinations. Naugahyde’s got some stuff up his sleeve for the World Cup. That’s how Johnny rolls, gleefully giving his art away. To him it’s just making stuff — easy come, easy go. Like that Catholic art professor once told him back in Wisconsin, “Art should be fun or it’s just penance.”
