In Still Good, Chu puts the animate in inanimate; staying on brand, his art practice relays a deeper connection to the discarded, and finds the potential in the “damaged” or “no longer useful” through whimsical yet stern optimism. We caught up with the artist for a Q&A.
Still Good at the CDCP Project Space in Wilkinsburg is up thru 2/9. Gallery hours are Fri 2-7, Sat + Sun 12-5.
Tell us your history
Born June 15th, 1985 in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Haitian father in the US Navy and a Black American woman from DC and California. Moved around a lot - 5 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, 1 high school. 4-6th grade was spent in Guam, which was a magical experience for a 9-year-old. I also lived in Manila for 6 months after I graduated from High School when my dad joined the State Department and we became diplomats, which was also pretty magical for an 18-year-old.
My mother crafted my entire life - painting on wood cutouts to rubber stamping, a huge endeavor - so I was always around some kind of art. While her mother was younger, she was a makeup artist in Hollywood and worked on the set of the Thriller video, and would regularly house sit for Vincent Price.
Outside of making pulley systems in my room out of K’nex or piggybacking off of my mom’s interests, I didn’t get serious about making my own until I got my first digital camera when I was 16, which I bought with the money I got from my first job - at a movie theater. I was an amateur photographer with aims to be a famous party photographer (lol okay 2008!) and got the opportunity to move to NYC where I interned for podcast Keith and The Girl. Through them and the comedians they had on their show, I was able to become a freelance photographer and further develop my interest in portraiture.
I moved to Pittsburgh after a one-weekend visit in October 2010, because I was absorbing all kinds of bad energy from New York and I needed a break. I graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh with a certificate in Portrait Photography in 2013. During that time, I was also doing graffiti behind the scenes as Chu.
Graffiti has always been of interest to me as a narcissist. My first exposure to it was in Guam, a 36 mile in circumference Island in Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean, when I would see all of the boys in class practicing “bombing” letters. From there I fell in love with signing yearbooks simply because it cemented the idea of being remembered, which was probably important for me as a traveling military kid. Around the time I was 20 I was visiting Richmond VA and DC a lot, and I started seeing the tag “Borf” in both places. My mind was blown - being able to recognize a “signature” across multiple spaces - why wouldn’t I want that for myself?!
So Pittsburgh ended up being the first place in my life where I was an unsupervised adult, with way too much free time and no one to spend it with. Fast forward to the Graffiti Task Force raiding my house with a search warrant, me ending up turning myself in for 65 counts of criminal mischief, totaling $47,000 and incurring a $100,000 bond for my first-time criminal offense.
I got my first art show ever 3 months after I got out of my 6 days in jail in April of 2016, where I showed art as “Chu” for the first time since the papers outed me anyways. I sold 39/47 of the pieces I made, some of which were on cardboard, all sourced from trash pickup days in Lawrenceville and Goodwill. Since then I’ve had 3 more solo shows, a residency at the Ace Hotel, I partnered up with other local graffiti writer Max “Gems” Gonzales and together we have curated on 7 group shows, focusing on outsider art and people of color, one of which we were able to produce with a grant from that we were awarded from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council - the Glow Up - 40 visual artists of color in varying levels of their artistic careers were given stipends to make/complete art for the show. From there, Max and I have become muralists and hope to continue to use our artistic energy for mostly good. Mostly.
If you had to categorize yourself, what would it be?
A hot gay mess. But also a photographer, illustrator, and muralist.
Can you talk a bit about your process? Have you always included objects in your practice? Is it new?
Everything non-photography related that I’ve done, I’ve only been doing since 2011, so it’s still in its toddler stage. Because no one thought to give ME any Adderall or Ritalin (or weed), I didn’t have the patience to know that I could draw, until I started practicing graffiti in blackbooks (where I also didn’t have the patience to ONLY draw my name, so I started teaching myself how to draw because I was smoking hella weed at that point.)
I only started including objects into my painting practices when I did my residency at the Ace Hotel. They gave me an auxiliary room to paint the walls and whatever furniture I brought into there, within a 24 hour period. I would have stayed up the entire night but I had court for my graffiti stuff the next morning, my birthday. What a life.
How do you source your materials?
My dog walking has been integral to my art practice, as it gave me a cover to be roaming the neighborhoods at all hours while I was doing graffiti; now it’s useful in giving me a reason to roam my neighborhood streets and see frames and shapes that people throw away. Other than that, I’m a regular at Goodwill in Lawrenceville.
What’s the significance of that?
Since I’m still a widdle baby artist with a small amount of attention and not that much-developed skill, I like to rely on the pre-existing backgrounds of the paintings I find. The things I FIND I collect like a packrat, hoping that one day they’ll be useful. The things I BUY, I very much enjoy anything that looks like it would be hanging in a motel lobby, things that have circles in them or have elements that would allow for circles (because of the shape of my tag, which I shoehorn into everything.)
Where do you want to go with your work?
I’m having the best time simultaneously developing my illustrating ability and my technique as a painter. I pour all of my ideas into the sketchbooks that I make at my job at the print shop and paint them when the right idea meets the right canvas. I hope to continue to work on my ability to use humor (and cuteness lol) in my artwork, even when dealing with big emotional emotions, which I’m not the best at yet.
If you could make anything what would you do?
I’d tag the moon.
Jerome Chu. Plastic Bag, 2020, $175. Tropical landscape with palms, boats, human figure and attached plastic bags.