Tomatâ du Plenty Archive

Tomatâ du Plenty, Tomatâ Screamers (self portrait), 1999. Mixed media on paper, 9½ × 8 in., painted on a page torn from Ernest Thayer's Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.
Carlos Iglesias Collection. Reproduced in the program for Boxers and Backbeats, Georgia Museum of Art, 2014. Pending estate authorisation.

Who he was

He was born David Xavier Harrigan in New York in 1948, ran away to Hollywood at fifteen, and spent the next thirty-five years becoming several different people in public.

A Ze Whiz Kid in Seattle. A Cockette in San Francisco. Then the frontman of the Screamers — the Los Angeles band that replaced guitars with keyboards, became the most talked-about act in the city, and never released a record. What survives of them is a logo, some video, and the memory of people who were in the room.

When the Screamers ended in 1981 he picked up painting — the story goes that he found a kit of paints in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard — and kept at it until he died in 2000 — watercolour portraits, then boxers, entertainers, faces worked over whatever was at hand, including the pages of books. That work scattered into private hands across four decades and three coasts. Much of it has never been catalogued. Some of it is in a garage.

The record so far

1983 — 2000 The paintings Took it up after the Screamers ended; first one-man show at Zero One Gallery, Hollywood, 1983. Knock Out!, the boxer portraits, at the same gallery in 1988. Then Miami, then New Orleans.

2012 Into a museum collection The collector Gordon W. Bailey donates a group of du Plenty portraits to the Georgia Museum of Art, in honour of the four founding members of R.E.M.

Spring 2014 Big Hair: The Life and Times of Tomatâ du Plenty A multimedia event staged at Art Share Los Angeles by Carlos Iglesias and Helen Clarke, in close association with du Plenty's friends and collaborators.

Oct 2014 — Jan 2015 Boxers and Backbeats: Tomatâ du Plenty and the West Coast Punk Scene Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Curated by Lynn Boland. Carlos Iglesias contributed an essay to the exhibition program.

Aug — Sep 2025 Tomatâ — a retrospective MutMuz Gallery, Mark Mothersbaugh's gallery on Chung King Road in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Opened 15 August, closed 19 September.

Now The permanent archive Gathering what remains — and recording who held it, and how they knew him, before that knowledge goes with them.

Why this, why now

The people who knew Tomatâ are in their seventies and eighties. The paintings are on walls belonging to people who may not know what they have, or who got it from a friend of a friend and never wrote it down.

An archive is not a pile of pictures. What makes material usable — in a book, in a film, in a museum — is knowing where it came from and who can vouch for it. That part lives only in memory, and memory has a deadline.

So we record both: the object, and the chain of hands it came through.

His work is held in the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art, and in private collections across the country — musicians, designers, writers, and friends who bought a picture for twenty-five dollars because he would rather sell a hundred of those than one for two and a half thousand.

What we're looking for

Photographs & ephemeraSnapshots, flyers, posters, press clippings, film — Screamers era or after.
The paintingsWhere the work ended up. Who bought it, who inherited it, who still has one on a wall.
Letters & documentsCorrespondence, set lists, notebooks, anything in his hand.
RecollectionsYou don't need an object. If you knew him, what you remember is primary material.
NamesPeople we should be talking to — and anyone who knows who administers his estate.

Do you have something of his?

You keep everything you own. You choose how far your permission goes, and you can narrow it later. Nothing is sold or licensed on.

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