Boruch Alan Bermowitz (1938-2016) *78

known professionally as Alan Vega, was an American vocalist and visual artist, primarily known for his work with the electronic protopunk duo Suicide. Alan Bermowitz was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Until the announcement of the 70th birthday release of his recordings in 2008, Vega was widely thought to have been ten years younger; the 2005 book Suicide: No Compromise lists 1948 as his birth year and quotes a 1998 interview in which Vega talks about watching Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show (1956) as a "little kid". A 1983 Los Angeles Times article refers to him as a 35-year-old, and several other sources also list 1948 as his birthdate. Two 2009 articles confirmed his 1938 birth date, one in Le Monde about the Lyon exhibit and one in the magazine Rolling Stone. Vega also long claimed to be half-Catholic due to his mother's Puerto Rican ancestry. Although themes of Catholicism were important to his lyrics and visual art over the years, in a 2008 interview with The Jewish Chronicle he admitted he lied about his own religious upbringing to "fuel the myth".

In the late 1950s, he attended Brooklyn College where he studied both physics and fine art under Ad Reinhardt and Kurt Seligmann and graduated in 1960. In the 1960s, he became involved with the Art Workers' Coalition, a radical artists group that harassed museums and once barricaded the Museum of Modern Art. In 1969, funding from the New York State Council on the Arts made possible the founding of MUSEUM: A Project of Living Artists—an artist-run 24-hour multimedia gallery at 729 Broadway in Manhattan. Calling himself Alan Suicide, he graduated from painting to light sculptures,[note 1] many of which were constructed of electronic debris. He gained a residency at the OK Harris Gallery in SoHo where he continued to exhibit until 1975. Barbara Gladstone continued to show his work well into the 1980s.

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