Chicken Boy Was Here

“Welcome to Chicken Boy World Headquarters,” reads the large sign over the entry to 24-year-old Michael Andrews‘s studio. With its yellow face, droopy eyes, disinterested stare, red cock’s-comb hat and deadpan sense of humor, the Chicken Boy character is the artist’s primary creation and passion.

The Chicken Boy experiment is an attempt to become famous simply by being famous. By recruiting “CBI Agents” from around the country to put up stickers, posters and spray-paint the Chicken Boy image on walls, Andrews has engineered a phenomenon that’s a cross between Kilroy and a marketing campaign with nothing to sell but its own logo. The project has taken Andrews all the way to New York City’s art inner circle; he was arrested by the same two Giuliani-appointed task force police officers who hauled in the man responsible for Andre the Giant Posse, a similar street-art campaign.

Andrews, who works under the name Miguelito (“My sister wanted to be Mexican when she was little; I want to be Mexican now”), sits in the foyer of his 5,000-square-foot gallery/studio space with double-height ceilings. The space is covered in artworks of various media, from papier-mâché to dental molding gel to prosthetic breasts. Even the bathroom is something to behold, with a mirrored mural floor, a vat for a tub and a rocky, cavelike entrance. “If you’ve got a really shitty painting on glass, just put a light bulb behind it,” says Andrews, tongue planted deeply in his cheek, about a large backlit black relief portrait of a cauliflower floret.

“Is that what you’re saying about my painting that you made for me?” chides his girlfriend, who frequently comes by after bartending at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck, which is owned by Andrews’s parents. Throughout our conversation, a number of friends and artists pop in and out. The flux gives off the party vibe Andy Warhol’s studio once had; the visitors who come and go have just one thing in common: There’s nothing vanilla about any of them.

Converting the warehouse into a torrentially hip collective for area creatives is the next logical step for Andrews’s career. “This is what I’ve always been hoping for, but I thought I wouldn’t have something like it until I was 32,” says Andrews. “It’s been difficult to get it this far along. This whole floor was raw warehouse floor — real nasty, dirty, grimy shit that they drive forklifts around on.” After days of pressure-washing, wet-dry vacuuming, polyurethane-finishing and struggling with pokey plumbers, Andrews still insists the space has a way to go before it’s ready for the citywide open house known as the Art Crawl. After all, this is more than just a gallery. It’s the headquarters of an elaborate scheme to get the whole world to buy something he’s not selling.