Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Jerry Dreva
Conceptual artist and Les Petites Bon-Bons co-founder; born in South Milwaukee
$75,000
Jerry Dreva was the South Milwaukee conceptual artist who co-founded Les Petites Bon-Bons, a glitter band that never played a note and still made People, Newsweek, and Interview. He grew up across the street from the old library on Michigan Avenue, a kid who spray-painted Vietcong flags on mailboxes and got invited to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. He was born on January 8, 1945 — the same birthday as David Bowie, to whom he later mailed packages until the word “Bon Bon” turned up on the Ashes to Ashes sleeve, by Dreva and partner Bobby Lambert’s own account. He attended St. Mary’s, then seminary prep until they expelled him for radical views. “All he got out of seminary school was four years of Latin and no driver’s ed.” Hollywood, he wrote home, was “no different than Bucyrus Erie where my father spent his life working.” Back at the Voice-Journal he covered the “Art Gangster” who painted Day-Glo hearts on the Grant Park beach house between 1 and 4 a.m. He was the Art Gangster. The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art took his papers. He came home in the 1990s to care for his mother and died of a heart attack on March 26, 1997, at fifty-two. He is buried at Holy Sepulcher in Cudahy. South Milwaukee is birth, childhood, the newspaper beat, and the last years.