Shows, press and other evidence

About sixteen years of making things, roughly in order. Some of it went on billboards. Some of it went to auction. One piece went up above a Mickey Mouse shop in Times Square, which I'm still processing.

What people have said

"Street artist JBOY takes a bold approach, confronting the unsettling normalisation of plastic pollution in modern life."

FAD Magazine, July 2025

"Skilfully combines pop culture allusions with street art."

Artsy

"We had complaints, compliments, old ladies with blue bags were frustrated, the bird on twitter turned its nose up."

Me, on how Very Little Helper went down

2026

  • Wrestle Room at Atom Gallery, Stoke Newington, London, 10 to 31 October. A group show about British wrestling with Sir Peter Blake, Heath Kane, Ryca and a print signed by Kendo Nagasaki. I'm showing Still Runnin' Wild, a one-off painting on canvas. It's the first time in fifteen years I've had work at Atom.

  • Vote Binface, a free poster for Count Binface’s campaign in Clacton. Free, because democracy shouldn’t come with a postage charge.

  • The Standard, acrylic on canvas, Lot 40 in McTear’s Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity Auction on 16 October. I asked for the starting bid to be £10. All proceeds go to the charity.

  • Very Little Helper, the original drawing, announced on Posters and Prints Blog in March.

  • Unwavering artist proofs and Dead End hand-finished multiples, January and February.

2025

  • Merry Crisis, Advent, Festive Fire and Cross Fire, four framed one-offs for Wreck The Walls at Inner Circle Gallery.

  • Elfridges Artvent Calendar 2025. Daily drops through December. The last one in that format.

  • Seafood on billboards in Times Square, across the Netherlands and on a London Lites screen in Chelsea, for Le Good Society's Let's Live With Less Plastic in July. Covered by FAD Magazine.

  • Hollow (Gold), the Hollow timed editions, The Thinker and Take The Peace originals, September to November.

  • An Ozzy Osbourne tribute painting, which Posters and Prints Blog called the best they'd seen.

  • Smile, and the Soulmates and Resistance poster set, in the spring.

2024

  • Elfridges Artvent Calendar 2024. Daily drops through December.

  • Resilience and Beached on billboards in Times Square and in the Netherlands, including Hoofddorp, for Let's Live With Less Plastic in July. Covered by The Ethicalist.

  • Thirteen releases, which in hindsight explains the tiredness: Let Down, ID, Yoots, Torchbearer, Self Portrait, Home Tweet Home, Adoption, Feather Blade, Blinky, Heroine, Resistance, Haram and Smile.

At auction

  • Very Little Helper has turned up at Chiswick Auctions in London and at Heritage Auctions in the US. It's an odd feeling, finding your own print in a catalogue.

2015 to 2016

2010 to 2011

  • Very Little Helper, the hooded dog walker with a certain cartoon greyhound, comes out in 2010. Not everyone at the supermarket was a fan. Every little helps, apparently, except this.

  • A free download of Very Little Helper on Posters and Prints Blog, January 2011.

  • Hunnycide and After Wonderland one-offs, August 2011.

Things that got me here

Nobody makes anything from scratch. This is who I've been borrowing from.

  • Gary Larson's The Far Side. One panel, one line, done.

  • Guy Billout. Impossible pictures drawn with a straight face.

  • The Situationists. They called it détournement: take something familiar, turn it slightly and let it embarrass itself.

  • SAMO©. Basquiat and Al Diaz writing one-liners on New York walls in the late 70s, before anyone called it art.

  • Latrinalia. The actual academic word for toilet-door graffiti. People have been replying to each other on cubicle walls for as long as there have been cubicles.

  • Subvertising. Changing what an advert says without changing the font, so nobody notices until they do.

Something missing, or something mean you wrote about me that I should frame? j@jboy.co.uk