Image 1 of 10
Image 2 of 10
Image 3 of 10
Image 4 of 10
Image 5 of 10
Image 6 of 10
Image 7 of 10
Image 8 of 10
Image 9 of 10
Image 10 of 10
This gorgeous tome, bursting at the seams with scabrous missives from artist Christopher Sperandio, is a catalog to a retrospective exhibition at the Museu Abílio de Mattos e Silva in Óbidos, Portugal (October 8 through November 22, 2026), as part of Flexágono, a survey of comics, cartoons and animation, curated by Pedro Moura, at the Folio International Literary Festival. It is an in-depth look into the committed political art practice of Sperandio, with an intimate reveal of his working process. Included is an appendix of more than 1,600 drawings representing the daily drawings Sperandio has produced for posting on social media since 2020.
With new texts by Paul Karinak and Joshua Decter, and a conversation between exhibition curator Pedro Moura and Christopher Sperandio.
Limited printing!
**Preorders will include a limited edition gold and black sticker! All preorders will ship out in October! **
Christopher Sperandio is an American artist known for collaborative art practices that bridge fine art and popular culture, particularly through comic books and television. Born in 1964 in the coal-mining town of Kingwood, West Virginia, Sperandio’s upbringing in a rural, working-class Appalachian environment deeply influenced his later interest in socially engaged art. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from West Virginia University in 1987, and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991.
Sperandio first gained notoriety through his artistic partnership with British artist Simon Grennan, which began in 1989. Operating as Grennan & Sperandio, the duo produced numerous projects commissioned by arts institutions, including MoMA/PS1, London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Aarhus Kuntsmuseum, Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Public Art Fund in New York, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, Hong Kong’s MaD Asia, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Colin De Land represented the pair at his gallery, American Fine Arts.
One of Grennan and Sperandio’s most celebrated works, We Got It! (1993), involved collaborating with factory workers to design a new candy bar for the exhibition, Culture in Action, a project later cited by Arthur Danto in After the End of Art as a landmark in relational aesthetics.
Essays about Sperandio’s work appear in numerous survey books especially concerning relational, social and collaborative art. Articles have appeared in The New York Times, Art In America, Artforum, Frieze, Diário de Notícias, La Jornada, Flash Art, Sculpture Magazine, ArtReview, Soap Opera Weekly and others.
In 2006, Sperandio expanded into TV as the creator and executive producer of ARTSTAR, the first reality television series set in the New York art world, running for two seasons and airing in 35 countries.
His recent solo work includes the Forced Collaboration Trilogy, featuring the graphic novels Pinko Joe (2020), Greenie Josephinie (2021) and This Year Is This Year’s Last Year (2023). Sperandio employs a traditional comics-making process known as détournement. He rewrites, redraws and recolors collages of vintage comic book panels, transforming them into political satires that critique neoliberalism and the erosion of democracy.
Since 2020, Sperandio has maintained a daily drawing practice, published on Instagram at @pinko_joe, on PinkoJoe.com and his newsletter, Pinko Joe’s Bright Red Line, producing more than 6,000 drawings in six years. In 2023, Sperandio was awarded a Citizen Design Award from PRINT Magazine, honoring work designed to protect democracy and ensure voting rights around the world.
Sperandio is an Associate Professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he founded the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop. CATS (cats.rice.edu) is a hybrid research, learning and production space dedicated to arts, comics and books.
