BOB & BOB began working as a performance art team in 1974, when Francis Shishim (The Dark Bob) and Paul Velick (The Light Bob) met as students at Art Center College in Los Angeles. Under the mentorship of Llyn Foulkes, they developed a wry, freewheeling approach to art that was radical and startlingly original for the period. Producing drawings, paintings, sculpture, performances, happenings, short films, and music, they performed across America and Europe for more than a decade, in venues that included the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Chicago’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Institute of Contemporary art in Boston, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, the Walker Art Center, and the Kitchen in Manhattan.
Bob & Bob recordings were released by PolyGram Records, the Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A., and High Performance Records, and their short films and videos were featured on early iterations of cable television and in festivals internationally. A survey of their early work, Bob & Bob: The First Five Years was published in 1980 by Astro Artz and in 1986 a retrospective show was mounted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
In 2006 Bob & Bob were featured in the Pompidou Centre’s exhibition, “Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital,” and they were included in several programs at the Getty Museum as part of it’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, which is creating an in depth chronicle of the history of California art.
They produced a large body of work which can be seen in many public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, The Getty Museum. They are also featured in the Audio Collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Bob & Bob’s papers are archived in the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art.