How Dark My Love

TRIBECCA FILM FESTIVAL 2025 REVIEW! To see how high one can fly on wings made of vomit, step right up to see the excellent Joe Coleman documentary, How Dark My Love, by filmmaker Scott Gracheff. One of the longest-lasting figures of the Lower East Side scene in New York in the 80s, Coleman is an artist with a fascination with American outlaws, freak shows, and serial killers. He first rose to prominence in downtown performance art by doing a carnival geek act, where he bit the heads off feeder mice live and would light up several explosives strapped to himself onstage in nightclubs.

He was also painting while supporting himself by driving a cab, which would get you an outsider artist label back then, as no one expected anything from a NY cab driver in the 80s. Coleman’s paintings use a central portrait with smaller pictures with captions surrounding it, the composition of which seems solely inspired by the old Ripley’s Believe It Or Not newspaper comics. He has a semi-realistic cartoonish style where everyone has an intestine-like skin texture that easily flows into the more graphic imagery.

The subjects are usually famous murderers, though in this movie, he has a much more personal muse for his largest work ever: his wife of several decades, Whitney Ward. Coleman spends three years of his life working on the seven-foot-tall portrait, filled with pictures and captions of Whitney’s life swirling around her like bats at sunset.

Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward make a striking appearance at the Mermaid Parade, captured in full outrageous glory in Scott Gracheff’s How Dark My Love.

“Coleman spends three years of his life working on the seven-foot-tall portrait… of his wife.”

Back in Austin in the 90s, I used to hang out with an alcoholic gutter punk named Vomit, who never removed his Joe Coleman t-shirt that had a recreation of Coleman’s banned Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer poster. We had bonded over the crusted-up shirt, as at the time we were both part of the Coleman crowd. Everything alternative in the 90s was already being pioneered by Coleman in the early 80s. His 19th-century medicine show facial hair alone was being sported in the village before William Gibson even came up with the phrase steampunk.

However, neither Vomit or I could have ever predicted how mainstream everything Coleman would get once we hit the 21st century. What was deep underground fringe material in scuzzy New York in the 80s became the main fodder of cable TV in the aughts and teens, running shows about pretty much all the serial killers and outlaws Coleman ever painted. His exploding himself in public act is now seen as the plank the Jackass crew walked to stardom. While Coleman was once as deeply outlawed as you can get, appearing on Midnight Blue with Al Goldstein instead of Oprah, his fascinations are now utterly typical after being rerun for decades.