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Artist
Alan Vega
12+ albums
experimentalelectronicnew waverockabillyelectrobilly
about
Alan Vega (Boruch Alan Bermowitz, June 23, 1938 – July 16, 2016) was an American vocalist and visual artist, primarily known for his work with the electronic protopunk duo Suicide. Alan Bermowitz was raised in a Jewish household 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, and part Puerto Rican, but in a 2008 interview with The Jewish Chronicle admitted he lied about his religious heritage 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
