Delores Nita Felicia

Delores Nita Felicia are mythical planets from the intergalactic mind of Jimmy Tucker. Named after his beloved mother, aunt and cousin, the planets are bright as scoops of rainbow sherbet, topped off with googly eyes and Saturnian rings. Within them, people shapeshift into superheroes and monsters, their child and adult selves cohabitating in a field outside of time, living and reliving memories at once as if watching a favorite cartoon.

Jimmy is an artist born and raised in New York City, inspired by 90s Nickelodeon and the people he adores. He’s created over 300 psychedelic cartoon characters since he was nine years old, each named after a person he crossed paths with on his life’s journey. Jimmy’s recurring protagonist is Everette, a smiley purple alien inspired by a fellow artist at YAI Arts, the Manhattan studio where he works. In Jimmy’s drawings, Everette is often depicted squished into the center of a dynamic supersquad, featuring bespectacled suns and one-eyed baby vampires.

During his Summertime residency, Jimmy fulfilled a longtime dream of bringing his 2D characters to life. He built them out of paper mache, teaching himself through YouTube videos and oddly shaped balloons like a square and pumpkin. He wore Everette’s purple plaster head as a mask and wore it around the neighborhood, buying a slice and showering it with parmesan at our local slice shop, and waving to befuddled passersby. Jimmy collaborated with filmmakers Brina Thurston and JG Buckel on a video piece combining performance and animation in which he hops, Roger Rabbit style, between drawn and embodied worlds. The video captures Jimmy’s uncanny ability to make everything happen all at once, to live in a paradoxical time warp best represented by science fiction explorers, poets, philosophers, and Looney Tunes. 

Throughout his creative journey, Jimmy linked up with some other imaginative icons. He began collaborating with artist William Scott, who works out of Creative Growth in California, and is one of Jimmy’s favorite artists. The two talk weekly and mail partly finished drawings across the country for the other to complete. They became friends. Jimmy also visited the studio of storied mask maker Stanley Sherman, who offered practical tips and inscrutable wisdom while touring him through baskets of clown noses and plastic nipples. 

For his first solo exhibition, Jimmy transformed Summertime to a nostalgic and otherworldly spectacle inspired by Rocko’s Modern Life and Dexter’s Laboratory. Rainbow framed drawings depict boxing matches, kissing clowns, and people with taffy long legs, all existing under multiple shining suns. Through his exhibition, Jimmy invites you into his worlds, where all the biggest feelings – love and chaos and anxiety and endless change – squeeeze together with jaggedy lines and supercharged colors into, as Jimmy puts it, “one cosmic ball.”