C.T. McClusky American, c. 1900-?

Little is known about the life of C. T. McClusky beyond his connection to the circus and his striking mixed-media collages. A circus clown active in the late 1940s and 1950s, McClusky spent his winter seasons in an Oakland boarding house, where he created elaborate collages that reimagined the circus in its absence. His work was discovered in 1975 at a flea market in Alameda, California, by John Turner, then a curator at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, who recognized its artistic significance.

McClusky’s collages are rich with surrealist energy, blending photography with caricature, black-and-white with Technicolor, and realism with exaggerated fantasy. His compositions disrupt perspective and scale, creating dreamlike circus worlds where ringmasters loom large, animals defy proportion, and scenes are layered with an eclectic mix of historical and contemporary figures. Trains, airplanes, and automobiles frequently appear in his work, symbolizing both movement and displacement.

McClusky’s unique visual language reflects the mass media explosion of postwar America, incorporating imagery from newspapers, magazines, and advertising into dynamic, often chaotic, compositions. His collages, both nostalgic and visionary, stand as a testament to an artist who found creative liberation in the spectacle of the circus, transforming it into a surreal, ever-shifting landscape of imagination and memory.