Anel Jean Baptiste Jr.

Anel Jean Baptiste Jr. describes himself as part Andy Warhol, part Bob Ross. The multidisciplinary artist and self-described “80s correspondent” uses drawing, sculpture, video, and puppetry to revisit and revamp his favorite era with fervent devotion. 

Anel was born in Brooklyn in 1981. Though he was alive for most of the 80s, he couldn’t fully appreciate them, being a kid and all. In adulthood, he’s become not just an artist but a time traveler and 80s missionary. His subjects aren’t the decade’s typical big names, but rather the unsung heroes you might have flipped past on TV or driven by irl: the Coronet Brothers from the Juvenile Discount Furniture TV ads, Crazy Eddie and his electronics store, the old Amaco gas station on a corner in Crown Heights. 

In Anel’s fantasy timeline, politicians mingle with C-list celebs and cartoons descend upon city streets. His eye is discerning and unexpected: an infomercial salesman rises to superstardom and a defunct grocery store becomes an unlikely mecca. In his drawings, Anel uses loose strokes and scratchy, whirring lines to build something with momentum and incredible precision, a surge of hunches converging to hit their mark. 

Anel, who is a longtime member of YAI Arts in Manhattan, also makes trippy animated videos using a self-honed process he developed at the Brooklyn Public Library. In them, Anel remakes his favorite sitcoms like Benson and Three’s a Crowd, superimposing characters’ heads with warped simulacrums, so their mouths chomp open and shut at a new rhythm. Anel replaces the original dialogue with his own fantastical plotlines. (He voices all the characters himself.) The results are madcap unaired episodes that combine allegiant superfandom and hallucinatory absurdity. 

Finally, Anel’s sculptures use cardboard, paper mache, foam, and recycled materials to bring his 80s fantasies into three dimensions. Uncanny smurfs and oversized Monchichis comprise his visual universe, which contorts childhood cartoons into something strange and overgrown. 

In a time when past images and bygone moments are a click away, Anel offers a more textured and tactile way backward, a handmade time machine through the path of creative work. What does the past look like when accessed through memory, emotion, and desire? Through our hands and materials? Our fixations and longings? Anel’s work depicts the 1980s as it could only exist in retrospect: exalted, eroded, and always handmade.

This residency is generously supported by The New York Community Trust, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and New York Department of Cultural Affairs.