John Kelly’s artistic medium is being an artistic medium. For four decades, he has channeled the spirits of other creators, from the legendary Joni Mitchell to the imaginary Dagmar Onassis, a love child of opera legend Maria Callas and shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. “Performance for me remains character embodiment,” he says, “whether it’s an existing character or a character I invent.”
In “A Friend Gave Me a Book” at PPOW in New York, Kelly switches gears to visual media and turns his gaze inward to examine the most familiar yet inscrutable figure: himself. Over 182 illustrated panels, he recounts the traumatic 2002 accident that prompted him to reconsider the meaning and direction of his practice. The work has the feel of a freeform scrapbook, rendered in Prismacolor pencils, pastel and paint, embellished with string, silver leaf and sequin fabric. Prose flows into poetry, and remembered scenes blend with recreated paintings.
As the title suggests, it all began with a book: Caravaggio by John T. Spike. Inspired by the Italian painter’s tragic demise and brutally frank depictions of humanity, Kelly developed a performance as Dargelos Giacovarag, a character based on a cabaret alter ego. Like Caravaggio, Dargelos would die at 39, on the run, “making art to the bitter end.” “My entire career has been informed by mortality, by loss, by notions of life and death,” Kelly tells Observer. Little did he know that this piece would lead to his own brush with paralysis, if not death.
For the climax, he wanted Dargelos to be suspended in midair. Kelly was in his forties, in good shape and had done trapeze work a decade earlier while impersonating the drag artist Barbette. He hopped back on with perhaps a touch of overconfidence and, while executing a “monkey roll into ankle drop,” took the coach’s advice to turn in his feet without a second thought. He slipped into freefall and landed on the back of his neck.
Looking back, Kelly questions his compulsion to chase danger. “Does being a performer always have to hinge on some point of extreme trial,” he muses on one panel. “I’m called by madness, and I can’t explain it.” And yet, in a monograph published a year before the accident, he wrote, “I’ve always found physically demanding stage work to be a sure way of getting to the meat of a character.”
Kelly’s words and images take us through the shocking fall, the gym “silent with alarm and recognition,” the dreadful night at the hospital, no water, no painkillers and the sensations of his mind racing and his body fading. Through his supine perspective, we see the trapeze bar and ropes hanging overhead and the hospital ceiling that looks like a “dermabraised moon.”
Heightened emotions bleed into hallucinations of Caravaggio works. The scene of doctors inspecting Kelly morphs into The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, where apostles examine a wound on Christ. Elsewhere, he becomes the severed head of Goliath in David’s hand, or Saint Matthew visited by an angel of inspiration. Some spreads drift into Kelly’s meandering mindscapes… climbing Jack’s beanstalk, pondering the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus, picturing the tallies of days fluttering like the sparks of a bonfire.
The MRI, which Kelly likens to chiaroscuro, revealed fractures in the C4 and C6 vertebrae. Fortunately, he suffered no brain damage, required no surgery and was discharged with a neck brace and his mortality intact. “I came this close to being a quadriplegic,” he says. “It was a year before I felt like I was really back in my body.”
“A Friend Gave Me a Book” is a long-simmering work that has had multiple incarnations. During a 2006-2007 fellowship in Rome, Kelly stepped into the world of Caravaggio’s paintings through photography and videography. In 2011, he performed The Escape Artist at PS122, now Performance Space New York, speaking and singing about the ordeal against a three-channel video backdrop. The current set of illustrated panels began as storyboards he developed during summer residencies, which he then fleshed out in his apartment during COVID and completed in 2025 at a PS122 Gallery residency in the same building where The Escape Artist premiered.
Kelly continues to live with the impact of the trapeze accident, physically and psychologically. “We hold our histories in our bodies,” he says. “Even at this point, I can’t fathom that it actually happened.” Perhaps his reflections suggest that the life of an artist is Caravaggesque, that the calling leads them to inextricable extremes of ecstasy and despair. Art giveth and art taketh away.
2026 is turning out to be a busy year for Kelly. On February 12, he and musical collaborator Carol Lipnik will activate the exhibition, turning poetry into song and visuals into performance. He is also set to star in the play Bughouse, about “outsider artist” Henry Darger, and flex his countertenor pipes in the chamber opera Barcelona, Map of Shadows. He will record new music with his band Rimbaud Hattie, has an upcoming residency in Venice and is planning a new memoir.
Will he be making art to the bitter end? “I’ve no choice,” he says. “I’m an artist.”
“A Friend Gave Me a Book” is at PPOW through February 21. Bughouse will runs at the Vineyard Theatre from February 18 through March 29.
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