Raymond Pettibon (American, b.1957) is a painter and cartoonist born in Tucson, AZ, on June 16, 1957. He was born Raymond Ginn, but changed his name to Pettibon after his father gave him the nickname “petit bon,” which translates to good little one. The artist earned a degree in economics and worked as a high school math teacher briefly before returning to college. He graduated with a BFA from UCLA in 1977.
During the early days of punk music, the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pettibon produced artwork on fliers, promotional posters, stickers, and album covers. His most notable work from this period was for his brother's band, Black Flag. He also worked with other bands, including the Dead Kennedys, the Ramones, Meat Puppets, and the Minutemen. Pettibon’s work from this period was mainly done with India ink on paper in black-and-white, although he would add color using acrylic or watercolor paints or colored pencils. He began exhibiting his work in the 1980s. In 1991, the artist won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Painting, Sculpture, Print-making, Photography, and Craft Media. He released an anthology of his work, Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, in 1998. Pettibon won the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, in 2001. In 2004, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York gave him the Bucksbaum Award. In 2010, Pettibon won the Oskar Kokoschka Prize in Vienna, Austria.
The artist has been a part of group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA, in 1992, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2004, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Gent, Belgium, in 2010. He has also had many solo exhibitions, including shows at the Galleria Massimo de Carlo in Milan, Italy, in 1995, at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, in 2001, and at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany, in 2011. Pettibon has had work included in the collections of many museums, including at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, and at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2011, he had an exhibition at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, CA, titled Desire in Pursuyt of the Whole, in which many of his untitled works were shown. Pettibon currently lives and works in Venice Beach, CA.