Year(s): 1969
On the 4th of July, 1969, to protest the war in Vietnam, Skaggs erected four obscenely grotesque sculptures of the Statue of Liberty at Cooper Square in the East Village of New York. They were life size mannequins painted green and wrapped in barbed wire. One was in a wheelchair. Several were holding dismembered baby doll bodies instead of torches.
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Year(s): 1969
To satirize the Hell’s Angels, many of whom lived in Skaggs’ neighborhood on the Lower East Side in New York, and weddings, which he believed legalized the enslavement of men and women, and to generally have a good time, the artist built a customized tricycle and decorated it with all sorts of car stuff, i.e., fox tales, horns, lights, flags, a radio, and lots of chrome. With an actress friend playing his bride, he rode the trike around the neighborhood, calling it his Hell’s Angels Wedding.
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Year(s): 1969
On Valentine’s Day, Joey Skaggs and friends strung a fifty foot bra across the U.S. Treasury Building on Wall Street in New York City to embarrass Wall Street workers who were making national headlines for harrassing a female colleague with very large breasts.
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Year(s): 1968
On Christmas Day, Joey Skaggs and friends constructed a life size Vietnamese Nativity scene in New York’s Central Park and, dressed as American soldiers with plastic and wooden weapons, attempted to burn it to the ground to protest the war in Vietnam.
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Year(s): 1968
To satirize the busloads of tourists who came to the East Village to gawk at the hippies, Joey Skaggs rented a Greyhound sight-seeing bus and took sixty bearded, beaded, camera-toting hippies on a tour of suburban Queens. He called it his “Cultural Exchange Tour.”
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Year(s): 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969
On four consecutive Easters in the 1960s, Joey Skaggs took a two hundred pound sculpture depicting a cross with a naked rotting skeletal corpse to the streets of New York to protest the hypocrisy of the Church and man’s inhumanity to man.
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