Juggalos are an easy target, but really, they’re not all bad.
Sure, they noisily whoop-whoop around town, cloaked in clown paint and velour all hopped up on Faygo, but the likes of those torturing small Portland communities or trashing parks in middle America are the exception, not the rule.
Mostly, they’re just a bunch of weirdos, and we don’t mean that as a bad thing. Like any subculture, they’re a nuanced bunch, which is something British artist Lucy Owen discovered when she dove headfirst into the culture for a just-opened art exhibit in—where else—Detroit.
Her fascination started when someone on an internet forums he frequented admitted to being a Juggalo and was vehemently ridiculed for it.
“The negative reaction from the other people on the forum was so intense, I was wondering if he’d just admitted to being a child molester or a mass murderer,” she told Vocativ.
[pullquote]So I started to research it. What I found was a subculture so profoundly bizarre—at times shocking, and other times plain funny—that I felt compelled to start exploring it through my work[/pullquote]
She spent months listening to Insane Clown Posse, Twiztid and the rest of them; she hung out with Juggalos in and around Detroit and even went to the infamous Gathering of the Juggalos in July. The results are part of her Where the Juggalo Roam art show, some highlights from which we’ve shared in a gallery above. Surprisingly striking, no?
