P·P·O·W is pleased to present A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, John Kelly’s first exhibition with the gallery, and the inaugural display of the artist’s epic 182-panel hand-illustrated graphic memoir. Shown here alongside a multi-channel video performance of the same name — that both incorporates and responds to the visual autobiography — this work simultaneously represents the culmination of more than a decade of artistic creation, as well as a continuation of Kelly’s radical adoption of various historical and pop cultural personae as vehicles for exploring ideas of gender, truth, death, and the pursuit for creative identity.

Kelly came up in New York’s burgeoning downtown performance scene of the early-1980s. A student of both the American Ballet Theatre and Parsons School of Design, the artist employed his understanding of three- and two-dimensional form — segueing from the scrutinizing mirror of the dance studio to the mirror utilized for self-portraiture — to produce flamboyant one-acts at storied East Village venues, most notably The Pyramid Club, which Kelly has called “my home, my school, my shrine.” The embodiment of cultural figures (both real and imagined) became a throughline in these performances, with Kelly assuming the role of such characters as Egon Schiele, Antonin Artaud, Jackie Kennedy, Joni Mitchell, and most frequently Dagmar Onassis, the artist’s invented lovechild of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis.

In 2006, while preparing for a performance inspired by his obsession with the seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio, Kelly broke his neck after falling from a trapeze. A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, 2016-2025, is the artist’s retelling of this incident, interweaving his own personal trauma through narrative and poetry. In the process, Kelly points the viewer to examine lives lived fully despite the hazards of estrangement, loneliness, and death, and consequently takes on the risk for a promise of understanding and reprieve.

However, Kelly’s transposition of tragedy into visual memoir is importantly not proscriptive. Rather than use the personal to address the political, the artist instead offers multiple inroads for dealing with feelings of isolation and sense of self, in which reality becomes a palimpsest of interior monologue, human interaction, cultural allusion, and externalization. In the artist’s words, “My works flow out of a desire to embody a particular challenge or event, whether from imagination, actual persons’ reality, or personal history: life imagined, life considered, life experienced.” In this way, Kelly uses art to invite his audience into his illustrated world, not as witnesses, but as participants in the quest for consequence and acceptance.

Accompanying the larger-than-life installation is a video presentation that mirrors the chronology of the memoir, seeing Kelly utilize his command of voice, movement, and physical transformation to expound on his constructed reality. The artist has also transposed several panels from the memoir into gorgeously rendered oil on wood compositions, as evidenced by Self-portrait with Trapeze, 2025, providing the viewer with another channel for experiencing Kelly’s touching synthesis of Italian art history, forms of self-preservation, and modes of resilience.

On February 12, Kelly will activate the memoir and video, performing original music at the gallery that stems from and responds to the works on view.

Kelly will also star in the upcoming production of Bughouse, conceived and directed by Martha Clarke, and comprised of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley’s adaptation of the texts of outsider artist Henry Darger. Bughouse will run at Vineyard Theater, New York, February 18 – March 29, 2026.

John Kelly (b. 1959) was born in New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York. He has created over forty performance works, which have been commissioned by and performed at institutions including MET Live Arts, The Kitchen, Skirball Center, La MaMa, Lincoln Center, the Whitney Biennial, NY Live Arts, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and London’s Tate Modern. Kelly is the recipient of numerous awards and grands, including two Bessie Awards, two Obie Awards, two NEA Awards American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius Awards, a CalArts/Alpert Award in Dance/Performance, a Visual AIDS Vanguard Award, the Ethyl Eichelberger Award, and a Mabou Mines ‘Ruthie’ Award. Two of Kelly’s films (THE DAGMAR ONASSIS STORY and THE MONA LISA) are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kelly is a member of the investigative art song collective Rimbaud Hattie, which will perform on January 17, 7-9pm, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art as a closing program for the exhibition David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York. The band’s name is an homage to Wojnarowicz and the late artist Brian Butterick (aka Hattie Hathaway).