John F. Malta
California
Email: johnfmalta@gmail.com
Website: johnfmalta.com
Biographical Statement: I am a Cleveland, Ohio-born, multi-disciplinary artist, author, and educator. After spending most of my life along the Erie shore of Northeast Ohio I moved to New York City where I earned an MFA in Illustration As Visual Essay from The School of Visual Arts. Later, I relocated to Kansas City, where I work out of a studio based in the West Bottoms. For the past decade, I have illustrated and art directed projects for companies and institutions such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Adult Swim, Beyond the Streets, Garbage Pail Kids, The Wall Street Journal, Honda, The Boston Globe, Liquid Death, Complex, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Dr. Martens, Blizzard Entertainment, Premier Guitar, The Museum of Arts & Design, The Washington Post, Blink-182, and Sports Illustrated For Kids. In addition to Various Bands, Professional Wrestlers, Music Venues, Alternative Weeklies, Record Labels, Punk Houses, DIY Spaces, & more. My paintings, comics, zines, and installations have been exhibited widely nationally and internationally at galleries, art book fairs, and institutions such as Comic Arts Brooklyn, Comic Arts Los Angeles, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, The Museum of Cartoon and Comic Arts Festival, Hashimoto Contemporary, New Image Art, Spoke Art Gallery, Good Mother Gallery, Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, Renegade Chicago, Superchief New York, Superchief Los Angeles, Gallery 1988, Gallery Nucleus, Cooler Gallery, and Skylab Gallery. My first picture book, Intergalactic Moving Day, follows an outer space boy as he gets ready for a very big change. On the last day of every year, his people celebrate Intergalactic Moving Day: the day when their planet fizzles out and they blast off for a brand new homeworld that blooms in the sky. Intergalactic Moving Day was published by POW! Kids Books and is distributed worldwide via Simon & Schuster. I am also the creator of the ongoing punk zine Odyssey Haunted Francis and my comic art and illustration have been awarded and recognized by AIGA Eye on Design, The Xeric Foundation, The Society of Illustrators, Juxtapoz, KIRKUS, and American Illustration.
Artist's Statement: My professional practice as an illustrator explores the convergence of illustration, comic art, installation, and design. My studio practice employs a multitude of art-making techniques to execute, editorial campaigns, motion-based advertising work, comic books, picture books, zines, gallery exhibitions, performance-based video art, and experiential roadside attractions. Furthermore, I am most interested in building narrative worlds that imbue the projects that I work on with a sense of depth and reality. Those worlds are then utilized as a launching-off point for the client projects, comic zines, and gallery exhibitions that I work on. I have been self-publishing zines and comics for as long as I can remember. When I was younger I played in punk bands - punk aesthetics and DIY ethos are woven into the fabric of who I am as an artist. I’ve spent so much of my life skateboarding, drawing, and listening to/playing punk music. Those three things have informed a lot of my identity as a person and artist. Most recently, I worked on a series of large-scale woodcut figure sculptures that are currently installed at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. The figures were fabricated using a jigsaw, large sheets of plywood, and acrylic paint. The series is titled Haunted Francis in Fantasyland and seeks to unify the work I create digitally alongside large-scale wood sculptures. I have always been interested in how various forms of design and art communicate with one another. Blurring the barriers between digital illustration and traditional tactile art is something I have made a point to perpetuate whenever possible. The dichotomy between those mediums largely defines my identity as an artist. Beyond that, storytelling and writing are at the core of my creative output and I am perpetually seeking out ways to push those boundaries in our reality and the digital space.
Experience Level: 10 years +
What is your experience in the Public Arts: I worked in collaboration with the New York City-based Cooler Gallery as part of their residency Cooler Ranch to fabricate and install a roadside attraction titled Haunted Francis Storybook Village: https://www.cooler-gallery.com/john-f-malta-1 While not Public Art, I currently have a large scale installation up at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art that features a series of my oversized woodcuts: https://www.daummuseum.org/event/haunted-francis-in-fantasyland-living-on-deadlines/?mode=current