Door Coffin?
1955


Secret Coffin
1996

City of Chicago
1995

Six Computer Key Pads
1996

BIOGRAPHY

Tomislav Sava Carapic has not only vigorously decorated the entire interior of his small apartment in Manhattan with artwork on newsprint, signed with his thumb and hand prints, but has pasted his work on billboards and buildings throughout the entire midtown area. He was born in the village of Velisevac, Yugoslavia, in 1939, attended military school in the region of Herzegovina in the mid-1950s, and served as a sergeant in the Yugoslavian infantry. Denied a college education (he feels because he was not a member of the communist party), he illegally crossed into Italy in 1961 and emigrated to the United States a year later. In 1965 he began attending classes at the New York Art Students League but found the lessons boring, describing them as "like getting a vacation for some 10 million years." He soon dropped out and studied hairdressing at the Wilfred Academy of Beauty Culture. However, he did not find enough beauty-parlor work to support himself and lived in extreme poverty for the next several years. Eventually he found work as a slitting-machine operator for the Noesting Pin Ticket Company and began attending evening classes in Spanish Education at Manhattan Community College. There was a problem with earning enough credits to qualify for a degree in this field, and he was forced to switch to studio art classes instead. In the late 1970s he appar-ently began experiencing hallucinatory visions; he claimed that his degree problems were caused when "the evil marriage bureau massed the troops" against the college and proceeded with "an Air Force bombardment" of the school. He also experienced visitations from a "Mr. Brown and Madam" whom he has described as appearing to him "in his own likeness." Not long after the onset of these visits, he began making and posting his public art.

BOOKS

The End is Near! Roger Manley. Illustrated. Bio.