Bob & Bob

Bob & Bob are the Los Angeles performance art duo formed in 1974 by Francis Shishim ("The Dark Bob") and Paul Velick ("The Light Bob"), who met as students in Llyn Foulkes's painting class at ArtCenter College of Design. Rejecting an art world they found humorless and disconnected from everyday life, they invented a wry, freewheeling practice that spanned performances, happenings, paintings, drawings, short films, and recordings — always delivered in their trademark suits and masks of their own faces, and always aimed squarely at consumerism, high society, money, and the art system itself. In the seminal Sex is Stupid (1979), they hung suspended in a frame on the wall of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art for five hours while selling twenty-five original paintings at $25 apiece; for the twelve-hour New Year's Eve happening Forget Everything You Know (1980), they filled a downtown warehouse with a dump truck's worth of popcorn. Among the most popular and crowd-commanding performance artists to emerge from 1970s LA, Bob & Bob performed for more than a decade at venues including MOCA Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center, and The Kitchen in New York. Their work is held in the collections of MoMA, LACMA, MOCA, and the Getty, and their papers reside in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. In 2026, the duo's fifty-year legacy was celebrated in the retrospective Bob & Bob: 50 Years of Art | lost and found at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica.