Pat Perry (artist)

Pat Perry (born 1991) is an American painter and street artist based in Detroit, Michigan. He is best known for a series of sketchbooks and 35mm photographs documenting years of itinerant traveling around the United States and painting realistic depictions of 21st century America. His practice also includes mural painting, photography, illustration, storytelling, and freight train tagging.

Early life
Perry was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and grew up in Comstock Park. His father was a copywriter, and his mother was a remedial teacher. From 2009 to 2012, Pat attended Kendall College of Art and Design, but did not graduate.

Work
During the early 2010s, Perry gained recognition for his series of sketchbooks and photographs collected while traveling around the United States by hitchhiking and riding freight trains. His large-scale works and posters have called attention to various social causes through collaborations with groups such as AptArts, No More Deaths, and the UN High Commissioner For Refugees. He collaborated with the Beehive Design Collective on their years-long poster project, MesoAmerica Resiste.

Murals
From 2015 to the present, Perry created for his large-scale murals on buildings in Belgium, Mozambique, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Kosovo, New Zealand, and Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as several murals in Detroit. His murals depict diverse cultures and landscapes of different parts of the world, often involving humanistic, socially-conscious themes. In addition to murals on buildings, Perry has worked on murals on the exterior of a plane, automotive vehicles as well as a skateboard park.

Exhibitions
In 2018, Perry had his first museum exhibition, titled National Lilypond Songs, at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The show featured depictions of the American landscape, and was considered as a major shift for Perry. The style of painting was compared to the artworks of Andrew Wyeth and Grant Wood.

In 2020, Perry had his second solo exhibition, Song and Dance, at Takashi Murakami’s Hidari Zingaro gallery in Tokyo, Japan. In 2021, Perry debuted Sensemaking, which depicted quiet scenes framed through roadside vantage points and performances of costumed figures and contemporary symbols. The works centered around a broad theme of flawed logic while continuing his social commentary.

In 2023, Perry presented a solo exhibition, Which World, at Hashimoto Contemporary in Los Angeles. The artwork utilized images from crowd-sourced, public-facing archives like Craigslist or YouTube. Everyday objects were used to represent the effects of the digital age on day-to-day life in Perry's Craigslist series.