1969

Grotesque Statues


Year(s): 1969

On the 4th of July, 1969, to protest the war in Vietnam, Skaggs erected four obscenely grotesque sculptures of the Statue of Liberty at Cooper Square in the East Village of New York. They were life size mannequins painted green and wrapped in barbed wire. One was in a wheelchair. Several were holding dismembered baby doll bodies instead of torches.

Read more

Hell’s Angels Wedding


Year(s): 1969

To satirize the Hell’s Angels, many of whom lived in Skaggs’ neighborhood on the Lower East Side in New York, and weddings, which he believed legalized the enslavement of men and women, and to generally have a good time, the artist built a customized tricycle and decorated it with all sorts of car stuff, i.e., fox tales, horns, lights, flags, a radio, and lots of chrome. With an actress friend playing his bride, he rode the trike around the neighborhood, calling it his Hell’s Angels Wedding.

Read more

Fifty Foot Brassiere


Year(s): 1969

On Valentine’s Day, Joey Skaggs and friends strung a fifty foot bra across the U.S. Treasury Building on Wall Street in New York City to embarrass Wall Street workers who were making national headlines for harrassing a female colleague with very large breasts.

Read more

Crucifixion


Year(s): 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969

On four consecutive Easters in the 1960s, Joey Skaggs took a two hundred pound sculpture depicting a cross with a naked rotting skeletal corpse to the streets of New York to protest the hypocrisy of the Church and man’s inhumanity to man.

Read more