While Mikey’s sense of humor and philosophical preoccupations are grounded in the recognizable minutiae our somewhat redundant, if ever-cherished human lives, his imagination veers towards the fabulous and the transcendent.
For Mikey, art is an agent of transformation that can make the “everyday”, the ugly, the boring, into something urgent, mysterious, beautiful, Additionally (if aspirationally), Mikey believes art can be the means of revelation by which the superficial patina of “business as usual” can be removed from collective societal attitudes, thus exposing “reality” as the ridiculous miracle it indeed is.Â
Mikey was born in Santa Fe in 1986. He drew monsters in the margins of his math homework. He is steeped in the cultural aesthetic of the 1990’s but studies the history of American music to its roots. He was schooled in punk rock etiquette at Warehouse 21 in its heyday, where his artwork for local emo (and later jazzy, prog-metal) heroes Kidcrash first garnered the attention of what would become a small, but psyched, eclectic, and far-reaching following. His hallway drawings at Meow Wolf Santa Fe and his work behind the green curtain of LEGIT CONCERNS have been further benchmarks on the way to becoming an admired, though obscure, cult classic.Â
Mikey has years of experience as a teacher and art educator, known legendarily by the students and staff alike of one Austin elementary as “Mr. Hot Chito”. Mikey has written and illustrated the two books I Want to Write a Poem that will Inspire the World and Being a Dog is like Being a Kid, and has written songs for Justin Bieber, which Justin Bieber has neither recorded nor acknowledged the existence of.Â
