Jim Roche: Glory Roads

Jim Roche was born to run. His motorcycle exploits have been interwoven throughout his career. Sometimes riding is a dangerous course and he sustained serious injury in 1993 but hasn’t abaondoned the source of his glory-road imagery. Known also for his enthusiasm for outsider art, Roche celebrates native heritage. Despite the fact that the internet has created a global visual-arts village, Roche observes a more specific sense of place. His background piece at the Whitney Museum of Art in the 1970s catapulted him into the New York Art world, and yet, not long afterward, sent him back out of the city to return to his roots and his inspiration in what was, in that decade, the very deep South.

Not to be confined to one medium, Roche has been a ceramist, an assemblage sculptor, a videographer, a curator of Haitian and outsider art, and he paints and draws in a lively Florida vernacular.