The History of Pranks - The Art of the Prank

September 21, 2026September 21, 2026

RIP Screaming Mad George 1956-2026

A heartfelt farewell to Screaming Mad George (a.k.a. Joji Tani), who left us on February 10, 2026. He was my student at SVA in 1977. I was teaching media communications, and to involve the students in the art of creating a spectacle, we took to the streets. The idea was to use a diversionary tactic to grab public attention.

The students staged a fake demonstration about a real issue in front of the New York governor’s office — the environmental impact of the supersonic Concorde jet. In the midst of the demonstration, the protesters were attacked by New York’s legendary Sewer Monster, created by Screaming Mad George.

This was early in his extraordinally creative career designing visual effects for bizarre, macabre, and gruesomely realistic effects. Read the full story here.

Screaming Mad George as the monster in Joey Skaggs’ “Sewer Monster” Performance, 1977, New York, NY

Read his obituary here: “The Man Behind The PS1’s Oddest Game, Has Passed Away”,

September 21, 2026

Attempting to Humor the Humorless

There’s a long history of clowning for social justice. We need more of it. Thank you Felipe.

Send in the clowns: the new guard of activists combating the right, by Morgan Jerkins, The Guardian, September 16, 2026.

A growing cohort of performers ‘clown’ as a means to innovate traditional protest and create social change

On a humid morning on 15 July, Tillie the Clown, a Brooklyn-based drag performer whose real name is Taylor Horne, was waiting to be let inside a New York City council meeting. Horne had started getting into character at 5am, for a makeup and clown-costuming process that would take two hours. It would be another 10 hours before Horne was allowed to address the city council about the passing of Romanch’s Law, which would phase out and ultimately ban New York’s horse carriage industry.

Read whole article here.

August 28, 2026September 23, 2026

RIP Yayoi Kusama 1929 – 2026

Remembering Kusama: In 1968, artist, Yayoi Kusama joined Joey Skaggs’ Hippie Bus Tour to Queens. In a satirical ironic reversal, the group toured neighborhoods and snapped photos of suburbanites mowing their lawns and washing their cars. When the group stopped at Hillside’s Nirvana head shop in Queens, the “Group Image” band played while Kusama painted polka dots on the naked dancers.

Read The Guardian’s Obituary here:
Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist who became a global superstar, dies aged 97, by Tim Jonze and Sian Cain, August 26, 2026.

July 17, 2026July 17, 2026

Alice Neel’s Portrait of Joey Skaggs on Exhibit at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal

On the go with Alice Neel…

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal has mounted an exhibition of portraits by the American painter, Alice Neel called, “Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect.” It includes Neel’s 1967 portrait of Joey Skaggs.

Announcement (in Portuguese): ‘Soul collector’ Alice Neel arrives at Serralves with “Beautifully Imperfect”, Lusa, July 15, 2026.

July 17, 2026

Too Hot to Handle?

Challenging the status quo.

33 Banned Artworks Deemed Too Controversial for Public Exhibition, by Jaycee Gudoy, Go2Tutors, July 14, 2026.

Art has always made people uncomfortable. That’s not an accident — it’s frequently the point.

But there’s a difference between art that challenges and art that societies, governments, galleries, and institutions have decided crosses a line so completely that the public simply isn’t allowed to see it. Censored, seized, locked in storage, refused at the border, yanked from museum walls mid-exhibition: the works collected here have all been banned, suppressed, or blocked from public view at some point in history — and often for reasons that reveal far more about the censors than about the art itself.

Some of these decisions were later reversed. Many weren’t. Read the whole article here.