Cereal Killer: Bobby Grossman's Corn Flake Boxes at Ki Smith Gallery
Bobby Grossman's Corn Flakes box featuring Andy Warhol. Photo by Lisa Freeman
By J. Scott Orr
Andy Warhol once said, “You need to let little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.” Like, say, a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, America’s most anodyne breakfast commodity. Honestly, when it comes to quotidian American consumer products, nothing is more ordinary than a box of Battle Creek’s most famous spawn. Except, maybe, a can of Campbell’s Soup.
Anyway, it’s safe to assume that the Pop Art progenitor didn't expect that nearly 50 years after posing with a bowl of cereal in one hand and a spoon in the other his image would appear on a monumental cardboard recreation of a Corn Flakes box. The same could no doubt be said of David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell and a raft of other 1970s downtown luminaries who posed as part of photographer Bobby Grossman’s conceptual breakfast cereal art project. Yet here they all are.
The Warhol box and the others are being shown to the public for the first time as part of an exhibition called "Corn Flakes and More," open now at Ki Smith Gallery in the Lower East Side. The exhibition also includes dozens of Grossman’s classic black-and-white period shots of downtown scenesters and a collection of his collaborative works with stencil maestro Shepard Fairey.
Carlo McCormick, the American culture critic and curator, was among those who showed up for the opening the other night. He said Grossman’s idea to use breakfast cereal as a prop in capturing a cultural phenomenon never really got soggy, even after all these years.
“There was a kind of a nihilistic pop irony going on at the time and somehow the Kellogg's Corn Flakes idea sort of captured that. You know, most of our old ideas don't age that well, but this one really did,” he said.
Ki Smith, left, and Bobby Grossman stand next to the cereal box with Grossman's image of Debbie Harry on it. Photo by Lisa Freeman.
In the centerpiece of the show, Grossman captures Warhol in a perfectly ironic tableaux: the master of commercial art appropriation himself appropriated onto a commercial cereal box. In the black-and-white photograph Warhol's expression is characteristically inscrutable yet deeply compelling. His face registers somewhere between bemusement and detachment—the same calculated blankness he cultivated throughout his career. His eyes, magnified slightly by his clear-framed glasses, stare not at the cereal but slightly off-camera, as if contemplating the multilayered irony of the moment.
Is he thinking about his own Campbell's Soup can series as he holds this most mundane of American breakfast foods? The parallel would not have been lost on him. There's a subtle tension in his posture—his rumpled suit jacket upset ever so slightly by the everyday act of eating cereal – that creates the visual friction that defined much of Warhol's artistic practice.
Warhol seems both participant and observer here—engaged in the performance while simultaneously analyzing it. His slight grimace suggests he's in on the joke, aware that he has become the consumable image he spent his career creating. In this single frame, Grossman captures the essence of Warhol's legacy: the blurring between high art and mass culture, celebrity and anonymity, sincerity and artifice.
The Corn Flake images of Warhol and the other downtown luminaries were captured by Grossman at various locations in the late 1970s. Now, for the first time, they have been transformed into monumental cardboard sculptures for the show. The oversized cereal boxes represent a significant evolution of what began as a personal art project during a mono-induced summer bedrest in 1975.
"It kind of just happened," Grossman said, explaining how the project grew from a mock-up he made by applying a Mick Rock image of Lou Reed to a Corn Flakes box. A friend suggested he expand the project and take photographs of notable people eating Corn Flakes.
"It just seemed like a way to engage with the subjects and to make them human. Everybody eats breakfast,” Grossman said during an interview at the gallery on the eve of the show’s opening. “I was just taking pictures of my friends with the cereal. I’d bring the cereal and the bowl and the milk and so forth and they posed for me. What happened, happened,” he said.
“They all seemed to have fun with it, even David Byrne,” Grossman said of the mercurial Talking Heads frontman. “Seriously, he probably had the most fun of any of the subjects. He actually ate the whole bowl of Corn Flakes,” he added.
Grossman's Corn Flake box featuring David Johansen, the late New York Dolls' frontman. Photo by Lisa Freeman.
One of the boxes gave Grossman pause for a moment of deeper reflection on the passage of 50 years. David Johansen, who pioneered New York punk as the frontman of the seminal New York Dolls, died just over a week ago. “I was heartbroken to hear he had died. I knew he had been sick for some time, but still, it was sad. He was one of a kind,” Grossman said.
Grossman’s image captures an unguarded moment, with Johansen’s easy smile and tousled hair returning viewers to a fleeting moment of lightness from downtown's golden era. The Johansen portrait, more than any of the others, is a reminder that for all the rampageous art making that was taking place at the time, there was also a lot of joy among the scene’s participants.
Punk Magazine artist and founder John Holmstrom stands with the artwore he created for the back side of Grossman's boxes. Photo by Lisa Freeman.
Besides the obvious historic appeal of Grossman’s photographs on the front, the cereal boxes gain enhanced punk-era authenticity on the reverse side, where detailed comic-style instructions on "How to Eat Corn Flakes" have been illustrated by John Holmstrom, founder and lead artist of the legendary Punk Magazine. Holmstrom's anarchic illustrations are the perfect counterpoint to Grossman's straight-faced photographs, the two artists bookending the downtown aesthetic—one documenting with deadpan precision, the other exploding conventional formats with manic energy. McCormick said he found “a lot of spiritual symmetry” in the collaboration.
“Bobby asked me to do something for the back of the box. I didn't have any ideas so he suggested instructions on how to eat Corn Flakes would be great, and here it is,” Holmstrom said as he stood in the gallery surrounded by the boxes with his artwork on the back. “These pictures were taken around ‘76 and here we are almost 50 years later and they’re finally on the box.”
“What makes Bobby’s Corn Flakes collection so compelling is how it bridges punk’s anarchic spirit with the more intentional conceptual art happening downtown at the same time. His Corn Flakes boxes marry Warhol’s consumer culture critique with punk’s ironic stance toward American commercialism,” said Ki Smith, the gallery's founder.
“This show is particularly personal to me as it highlights my neighborhood and the incredible culture that paved the way for what we are doing today,” he added.
The cereal box display is set up before a blow-up of a contact sheet from Grossman’s shoot with Warhol at the Factory thath further emphasizes the artistic process behind these seemingly casual images. Looking at the 30 frames of Warhol, bowl and spoon in hand, viewers can trace Grossman's creative process, leading to one image being singled out from the broader sequence of shots.
The front gallery at Ki Smith presents a striking collaboration between Grossman's photography and Shepard Fairey's distinctive graphic treatment. This section features Grossman’s portraits of Debbie Harry and David Byrne, transformed by Fairey's signature stencil-based aesthetic. The centerpiece is a concert poster-style collage celebrating a Blondie performance, complete with vintage show details, setlist fragments, and band silhouettes against a vibrant red, black, and cream palette. This work was, for years, the subject of a beloved Fairey mural at the corner of Bleecker and Bowery in the East Village.
These works exemplify Fairey's approach to underground cultural imagery, while simultaneously elevating Grossman's original documentation into a contemporary fine art context. The placement of these pieces in the entrance gallery creates a chronological bridge, connecting Grossman's historical photographs from the 1970s to their continued relevance and circulation in contemporary visual culture, effectively demonstrating how downtown New York's punk mythology continues to resonate through different artistic interpretations.
Viewers consider Grossman portraits of, left to right, David Byrne, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joey Ramone. Photo by Lisa Freeman.
In its basement space, the exhibition offers the essential counterpart to Grossman's Corn Flakes sculptures. Here, in a meticulously arranged grid of black-and-white photographs, viewers encounter the raw documentation that established Grossman as one of downtown New York's preeminent visual chroniclers.
The stark white walls and systematic arrangement create a clinical atmosphere that stands in deliberate contrast to the chaotic energy of the subjects themselves. In this subterranean space, an oversized portrait of Debbie Harry commands center stage, her iconic blonde hair and penetrating gaze serving as a focal point around which the constellation of portraits revolve.
The installation reveals Grossman's talent for capturing unguarded moments. Among them: rockers David Bowie, Johnny Rotten, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Richard Hell, Stiv Bators. Also tossed in are a pair of historically important artistic icons: neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and “Naked Lunch” author William S. Burroughs.
What distinguishes Grossman's work from mere documentation is his insider status. His subjects’ relaxed postures and direct gazes reveal a photographer who wasn't perceived as an intruder but accepted as a participant. Grossman’s work is both visual census and sociological record of a moment when cultural hierarchies were being dismantled by a loose collective of musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers in a neglected and overlooked part of downtown Manhattan.
With "Corn Flakes and More," Grossman's work completes a fascinating circle—from summer collage project to documentary photography to gallery exhibition to sculptural installation—all while maintaining the playful spirit captured in his original artist statement: "Looking back, I was just having fun with my friends."
"Corn Flakes and More" runs through April 13 at Ki Smith Gallery, 170 Forsyth Street, New York.
