The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne Makes Museum Debut in Baltimore
King’s mouth
If you have been to any Flaming Lips’ show, if you follow their frontman Wayne Coyne on Instagram or any social media, you know they are a very visual bunch, their gigs are the most colorful ones you can attend, they are always populated by fuzzy characters, giant rabbits, mushrooms and rainbows, and a few other ones escaped from the Wizard of Oz, and the crowd is constantly bombarded by a thunderstorm of confetti and balloons,… it’s always a psychedelic orgasm and it’s never the same thing twice. And I am not even talking about the endless imaginative and totally crazy ways they come up with to release new music via flash drives embedded in gummy skulls, or about their DIY science fiction Christmas movie filmed in Wayne’s backyard.
Wayne Coyne, the mastermind behind this visual delirium, is creating a brand-new visual artwork for the next exhibition at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM). The exhibit, The Big Hope Show, will ‘thematically explore issues relating to hope and transcendent survival and showcase works from dozens of visionary artists and thinkers, including drawings, sculpture’. For his first museum show ever, Wayne will present an immersive installation entitled ‘King’s Mouth’
‘Wayne Coyne’s work is among the most jubilant in our Big Hope Show,’ said AVAM founder Rebecca Hoffberger, who is curating the exhibition. ‘Surviving a violent, near-death experience awakened in him a joy and a tsunami of endless creativity rarely seen in anyone. His drawings remind me of those most beloved by Saint-Exupéry, his lyrics are poetry.’
She is visibly a big fan and if you are wondering about the near death experience she is talking about, you have to know that Wayne Coyne had a loaded gun put to his head during a robbery attempt in the 1980s!
Baltimore is a crazy and weird city – isn’t it John Waters’ home? – and the AVAM was voted ‘one of the most fantastic museums anywhere in America’ by CNN. An impressive roster of pop culture figures have previously exhibited at the AVAM – writer William S. Burroughs, rock icon Jimi Hendrix, actor Terrence Howard, chef Mario Batali, and comics legend R. Crumb – so this next step seems like a great and natural progression for the Flaming Lips frontman.
The Big Hope Show will run from October 3rd 2015 through August 2016 and will feature, in addition to Coyne’s art, work from John Waters photographer/documentarian Bob Adams, fabric artist Chris Roberts-Antieau, drawings by Margaret Munz-Losch, anonymous PostSecrets selected by Frank Warren, activist artist Jackie Sumell, and many more.
And looking at the picture sent with the press release, it seems that Wayne has not lost his taste for aluminum balloons, rainbows and cartoon characters, typical Coyne art there.
