Ron English

For the American football coach, see Ron English (American football).

Ron English (born 1959 in Decatur, Illinois) is an American contemporary artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, designer toys, murals and multimedia projects.^[1][2] He coined the term "POPaganda" to describe his appropriation of advertising and pop-culture imagery to critique consumer culture, and has developed recurring characters such as MC Supersized and other satirical reinterpretations of commercial mascots that appear across his street work and studio practice.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Ron English
English at the 2012 New York Comic Con
Born	Ronald English 1959 (age 65–66) Decatur, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Pop artist, illustrator
Website	www.popaganda.com

Often described as the "Godfather of Street Art", English is cited by galleries and media outlets as an influential figure in street and pop-surrealist art.^[6][7][8] Since the early 1980s he has produced large murals, unauthorized billboard alterations and other public interventions, and his work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.^[5][9] He has been featured in documentaries including POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English and Living in Delusionville, and has appeared on television programs such as The Simpsons and the reality series Street Art Throwdown.^[10][11]

English created the fictional world Delusionville and fronts the musical group The Rabbbits, whose songs tell stories set in that universe.^[12][13] His imagery extends into fashion, toys, design and digital media through collaborations and commercial projects, including designer toys, special-edition sneakers and other branded merchandise, as well as NFT releases and artist-designed fundraising campaigns.^{[14][15][16][17][18]} He has worked with other street artists, designers and musicians in projects that link his POPaganda characters to music, performance and popular culture.^[19][20]

Career

English's career encompasses painting, street art, sculpture, designer toys, music and digital projects such as NFT releases.^{[1][21][22][23]} He describes his practice with the term "POPaganda", a mash-up of advertising, pop culture and art history populated with an expanding cast of original characters.^[24][25] Among the best known are MC Supersized, an obese fast-food mascot featured in Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me (2004), and Abraham Obama, a fusion of America's 16th and 44th Presidents first created in 2008 during the United States presidential election.^[24][26][27]

Beginning in the early 1980s, English produced street interventions and other guerrilla works as a form of "culture jamming", creating guerrilla art on advertising billboards before developing a parallel studio practice.^[28][1] Biographical profiles present him as a leading figure in street art and note that he has produced over a thousand billboards and painted hundreds of walls, including murals on the Berlin Wall’s Checkpoint Charlie and on the West Bank separation barrier.^[29][30] His campaigns have targeted tobacco, fast-food and other consumer brands, reworking mascots such as Joe Camel and Ronald McDonald in order to satirize advertising and consumer capitalism.^[31][32][33]

Alongside his outdoor work, English maintains a studio practice in oil painting and is described in gallery and museum biographies as a fine art painter specializing in oils whose dominant style is characterized by extreme photorealism, striking use of secondary colour and appropriation of pop imagery.^[34][35] These profiles note recurring themes of revisiting childhood from an adult perspective and examining the darker meanings behind garish pop surface imagery, as well as his use of historical compositions such as The Last Supper, Starry Night and Picasso's Guernica as templates for contemporary narratives.^[34][35] In 2006 he exhibited Grade School Guernica, one of his versions of Guernica, at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston; the large painting restages the scene with his children from the point of view of the bomber aircraft, and the museum notes that he has since created more than 100 works based on the Guernica template.^[35] The motif continued in later projects such as the 2016 exhibition Ron English: Guernica at Allouche Gallery in New York, which presented eighteen new paintings reworking Picasso's composition with English's recurring characters.^[36][37]

English developed a fictional universe he calls "Delusionville", described in promotional and curatorial texts as an upside-down subterranean world populated by anthropomorphic animals and other recurring characters, including figures such as Elefanka, Mousezilla and members of his band The Rabbbits.^[38][39][40] Its inhabitants and settings appear across English's paintings, sculptures, comics, digital collectibles and music, and have been the focus of exhibitions that combine large-scale imagery and sculptural installations with soundtracks performed by The Rabbbits.^[41][42][43]

The feature documentary Living in Delusionville chronicles English's life and career, combining archival footage, animation and interviews, framing his story within the imaginary world that gives the film its title.^[44][45][46]

English leads The Rabbbits, a rock-oriented group he created as a musical extension of the Delusionville universe, with songs that tell stories from that fictional underworld.^[21][47] The band’s albums and performances draw on characters and themes from his visual work, with songs that reference the politics, mythologies and narratives of Delusionville.^[48][49] The Rabbbits have released recordings and performed live, extending English’s Delusionville imagery into music and performance.^[48][50] He has worked on collaborative music projects, including the band Hyperjinx Tricycle with musician Daniel Johnston and Jack Medicine, a recording project released on independent labels including Important Records.^[20]

English has also worked on music-related visual projects, painting album-cover artwork for bands and recording artists. He created the cover painting for The Dandy Warhols' 2003 album Welcome to the Monkey House, credited in the album packaging and described in label and fan materials as an example of his mash-up style, featuring a banana half-exposed by a zipper in reference to Andy Warhol's record covers.^[51][52][53] He produced cover art for Slash's 2010 solo album Slash, with contemporary art coverage noting that the album features his characteristic skull-and-crossbones imagery, and album documentation crediting the cover painting to English.^[54] In 2011 he created the cover art for Chris Brown's album F.A.M.E., widely reported as featuring English's painting on the front cover.^[55] Beyond record sleeves, English created the cover art for the Summer #1 / first print issue of Art Nouveau magazine, credited in contemporary design coverage and in the magazine's own history.^[56]

English's POPaganda imagery has appeared in film and television.^[57][58] His work has been featured in documentaries including Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me (2004), the street-art film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), and Spurlock's POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011), in which he is described as "the Greatest Living Artist".^[59][60] He is the subject of Pedro Carvajal's documentary POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English, which traces his billboard interventions and studio work.^[61][62] English has appeared as himself in The Simpsons episode "Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart" (2012) and has served as a guest judge on the Oxygen reality competition series Street Art Throwdown.^[63][64][65]

In the 2010s and 2020s, English expanded into large-scale immersive installations and digital-collectibles projects. In 2021 he presented Sugar Circus, a large-scale indoor installation at The Nest in the Q Plex complex in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, described by Shenzhen Daily as an exhibition by the U.S. artist at the Nest Art Center and by toy-culture press as a nearly 10,000-square-foot immersive art experience incorporating his original paintings, large-format sculptures and art toys.^[66][67][68] He also collaborated with Spanish event brand elrow on Delusionville, a club and festival theme created by English that adapts his POPaganda universe into an immersive party environment with metamorphic landscapes and anthropomorphic animal characters presented at elrow events internationally.^[69] On the digital side, English entered the NFT space in 2021 with the Ron English Essential NFT Collection on Nifty Gateway and has continued to release Delusionville- and Cereal Killers-themed drops, while also collaborating with the digital-collectibles platform VeVe on a sequence of POPaganda-based releases; by the mid-2020s he was participating in VeVe’s “phygital” convention programmes at events such as DesignerCon, where physical sculptures and merchandise by artists including English are sold with redemption cards for paired digital collectibles.^{[70][71][72][73]}

Some of these digital releases have been promoted as fundraising projects. In 2022 English worked with the platform VeVe on NFT drops whose proceeds were donated to the New Zealand Red Cross in support of humanitarian relief in Ukraine.^[16][17] During the COVID-19 pandemic he also designed face masks sold through an online campaign, with coverage noting that proceeds benefited the medical charity MedShare.^[18]

Murals, street art and public interventions

English has produced street-based work alongside his studio practice since the early 1980s, painting on buildings, billboards and other outdoor surfaces. Biographical notes and press profiles describe him as a prominent figure in street art and often refer to him as a "godfather of street art", highlighting the way his POPaganda imagery appears in public spaces.^[74][75][76] His early illegal billboard alterations and related culture-jamming projects are discussed in more detail in the section on culture jamming and billboard interventions.

Beyond billboards, English paints commissioned and festival murals. Profiles note his contributions to projects such as the Richmond Mural Project in Virginia and other curated street-art programmes.^[77] International initiatives including Urban Nation in Berlin and the Wynwood Walls in Miami list him among their participating mural artists.^[78][79] In New Jersey, local coverage describes a series of large-scale POPaganda murals produced in Jersey City as part of municipal and developer-sponsored public art initiatives.^[80]

Alongside solo works, English has taken part in collaborative mural projects with other street artists. A 2013 PBS SoCal report on Los Angeles's mural ordinance noted a joint commission featuring works by Risk, Shepard Fairey and English as among the first legal murals under the new rules.^[19]

Culture jamming and billboard interventions

Commentary on English's public work frequently situates his billboard practice within "culture jamming" or "subvertising", using commercial advertising space as a site for critical interventions. A career monograph published by Last Gasp describes him as a "seminal figure in the subvertising, or culture jamming movement" and states that he has "pirated over a thousand billboards" by replacing existing advertisements with hand-painted parodies.^[81] British newspaper coverage characterises these actions as a "guerrilla war against corporate America", highlighting long-running campaigns in which English and collaborators repaint or paste over cigarette, liquor and fast-food advertising.^[82][83]

Journalistic profiles highlight recurring billboard images that rework corporate mascots and logos. Examples include anti-smoking pieces that parody Joe Camel and fast-food imagery featuring obese or distorted versions of Ronald McDonald and other mascots, as well as political figures rendered with skeletal "grin" faces.^[84][85] Commentators describe these characters as deliberately exaggerated and sometimes grotesque, designed to draw viewers toward familiar branding while redirecting attention to issues such as obesity, addiction and political propaganda.^[86]

He has applied similar strategies to product packaging and smaller-scale advertising formats. Interviews describe projects in which he designed spoof cereal boxes, cigarette packets and other packages and then placed them on shop shelves through "reverse shoplifting" or "shop gifting", allowing shoppers to encounter the parodies in ordinary retail environments.^[87][88]

Although not a formal member, English has at times collaborated with the San Francisco–based Billboard Liberation Front, a collective known for altering commercial billboards to carry anti-corporate or political messages. The group's own history records a joint action with English during a 2002 campaign, and art-writing on ad takeovers cites him among the artists associated with billboard modification in North America.^[89][90]

Fine art

English is a fine art painter specialising in oils. Gallery and museum biographies state that he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas in Denton and an MFA from the University of Texas before relocating to New York City, where he apprenticed with several artists and began to sell his own work.^[91][92]

These profiles describe his dominant painting style as extreme photorealism with a strong use of secondary colour and the appropriation of pop imagery, often revisiting childhood motifs while examining the darker meanings behind glossy commercial surfaces.^[91][93]

In his studio work English reworks both popular culture and art-historical sources, combining advertising logos, cartoon characters, brand mascots and religious iconography within dense compositions.^[94][95] Essays and gallery texts note that he frequently revisits compositions such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night and, in particular, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, using them as frameworks for contemporary allegories about war, advertising and mass media.^[92][94][96]

English has also appropriated specific characters and mascots into recurring figures in his paintings. POP Fine Art highlights his “Grin” reinterpretation of Charlie Brown, the MC Supersized figure based on what Ronald McDonald would look like if he ate his own product, and an image of Marilyn Monroe with Mickey Mouse-style breasts, presenting them as satirical takes on American ideals of consumption and celebrity.^[91]

Among his Guernica-based works, the painting Grade School Guernica (1980) restages Picasso’s scene with English’s children as protagonists, seen from the vantage point of the bomber aircraft; the Gernika Peace Museum notes that the work was exhibited at Houston’s Station Museum of Contemporary Art and that English has since produced more than fifty further variations on the Guernica template.^[92] He continued this theme in later projects such as the London exhibition Lazarus Rising at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, which included canvases based on the Guernica composition, and the 2016 New York show Ron English: Guernica at Allouche Gallery, which presented new large-scale paintings reimagining Picasso’s work.^{[97][98][99][100][101]}

English’s fine-art exhibitions include Lazarus Rising, described by Elms Lesters and contemporary art press as his first UK solo show and accompanied by a limited-edition catalogue; Seasons in Supurbia (2009) at Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, which LA Weekly characterised as a “perverted spoofing” of Disney, G.I. Joe and Peanuts iconography; and Skin Deep: Post-Instinctual Afterthoughts on Psychological Portraiture (2011) at Lazarides in London, a solo exhibition focused on psychological portraits of historical and pop-culture figures.^{[91][102][94][95][103]}

Designer toys and fashion

English extends his POPaganda imagery into three dimensions through sculpture and collectible designer toys. Museum and gallery profiles describe his practice as spanning street art, fine art and “art toy design”, and designer-toy companies such as Kidrobot have produced limited-edition figures, busts and mini-series based on his characters and “grin” motif.^[104][105]

He began releasing designer toys in the mid-2000s, including an early figure, Ronnie Rabbit (also styled "Ronnnie Rabbbit"), produced as a vinyl toy by Dark Horse. In an interview about his work with toy companies, English identifies Ronnie Rabbit as his first toy.^[106] Subsequent projects include a limited-edition fiberglass bust based on his cover art for Slash's 2010 solo album, produced with Hong Kong sculpture house Garage Works and released in an edition of ten pieces signed by English and Slash,^[107] and the "Dum English" Star-Skull Astronaut figures and necklaces developed with R&B singer Chris Brown and presented as a limited-edition toy line at Toy Art Gallery, with turquoise and pink 10-inch vinyl figures and matching necklaces produced by Made by Monsters.^[108] English also worked with Pearl Jam on "Falla Sheep", a blind-box series of 3.5-inch "sheep in wolves' clothing" vinyl figures released in seven colour variants and sold both at retail and in conjunction with the band's tour activities.^[109]

English's POPaganda imagery has also appeared in fashion and footwear projects. Designer toy company Kidrobot lists a range of vinyl figures and art toys based on his characters as part of its POPaganda-branded releases.^[14] In 2021 Nike's SNKRS platform promoted a special-edition KD 14 "Ron English 1" basketball shoe featuring his artwork, described as a collaboration between English and NBA player Kevin Durant.^[15]

Books

• Original Grin: The Art of Ron English (2019)^[110]
• POPaganda: The Art & Subversion of Ron English (2004)^[111]
• Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)^[112]
• Ron English's Popaganda Coloring Book (2017)^[113]
• Ron English's Vandalism Starter Kit (2014)^[114]
• Lazarus Rising (2009)
• Art for Obama (2009)^[115]
• Abject Expressionism (2007)^[116]
• Son of Pop: Ron English Paints His Progeny (2007)^[117]
• Abraham Obama (2010)^[118]
• Art is a Horrible Waste of the Imagination (1988)
• Status Factory (2014)^[119]
• Death and the Eternal Forever (2014)^[120]