Raymond Pettibon
1957–
In Raymond Pettibon’s drawings, characters from recent history and pop culture mix with archetypal figures, and a literary sensibility collides with aggressive commentary. Pettibon’s drawings demonstrate his voracious appetite for culture both high and low, including politics, film, comics, religion, literature, surfing, and baseball. The artist received a degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977, around the same time he joined his brother’s punk band Black Flag, a now-famed force in the Southern California punk underground. Pettibon cultivated a distinct visual aesthetic that was crude and direct; his bold, black ink drawings combined with provocative texts reflected the energy and angst directed at the conservative agenda of the Reagan era. Language continues to be crucial to Pettibon’s practice, and he combines original writing with quotes ranging from film noir to Henry James and Proust. Extraordinarily prolific, he has produced thousands of drawings, which are typically exhibited in large, salon-style installations.
In this drawing from 1996, a stylized rendering of New York’s Empire State Building emits dots of light in a night sky. The drawing and caption evoke a bygone era while hinting at romance or social intrigue. The relationship of image to text is characteristically ambiguous: the vaguely anxious query written at the bottom of the work might refer to the wife of Pierre S. du Pont, one of the original financiers of the Empire State Building and a president of the DuPont chemical company, or perhaps to that of his ancestor Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a friend and correspondent of Thomas Jefferson. Generating a narrative with a minimum of words and image, Pettibon allows almost infinite options for interpretation.
Introduction
Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn, June 16, 1957) is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his older brother, Greg Ginn. He has subsequently become widely recognized in the fine art world for using American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, and religion to politics, sport, and sexuality.
Wikidata identifier
Q564945
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 19, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, cartoonist, illustrator, muralist, painter, photographer, video artist
ULAN identifier
500115615
Names
Raymond Pettibon, Raymond Ginn, Lance Pettibon
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 19, 2025.
