A fine body of work

The man busted earlier this month for allegedly defiling cadavers was none other than performance artist J.T. Colfax, who's appeared in this column numerous times. Denver native James Michael Thompson had changed his name to honor his hometown's longest street before he headed off to New York to find fame and fortune many years ago. Although fortune eluded him, Colfax achieved a certain notoriety for several of his artworks, including the Clarksburg Project, which involved sending unwanted missives--several describing his discovery that he was gay and the loss of his virginity beside a dusty Denver street--to the good folks of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a pen-pal town that Colfax picked at random. Unlike the subjects of that project, who were living and able to complain, the subjects of his current piece were not. Colfax, who returned to Denver last year, had been working in a local mortuary, where he'd taken to decorating cadavers with artistic messages after hours, then snapping their portraits.

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