The eldest of six children of Swiss and Italian immigrant parents, Tomaselli was raised in the working-class flats of Santa Ana, California, where men toiled not in the glamour world of Hollywood but primarily in blue-collar aerospace jobs. He was an altar boy—“but I was never molested,” he says, “unless I’ve repressed it”—and a born tinkerer, forever toying with go-karts and such in the garage. When he decided to go to art school, he recalls, “my father took me aside and said, ‘This is really stupid. You’re okay, but you’re not great.’ I was just like, ‘Yeah, well, f--- you.’ It wasn’t crushing. I think it strengthened my resolve.” Though his mom was a “Sunday painter,” he adds, “in my background there just wasn’t a sense that you could have a life as an artist.” His parents eventually changed their minds, but Tomaselli put himself through California State University, Fullerton, by working as an auto mechanic. After graduating, he subsisted as a handyman for a slumlord while living in a seedy section of downtown L.A. He also found work sheetrocking and plastering, and later as a framer.
Though his degree was in painting and drawing, Tomaselli quickly abandoned canvases for installations, incorporating the skills he picked up from his survival jobs. “First of all, [my painting] wasn’t any good, and second, I had real ideological issues with the whole bourgeois kind of context that paintings needed—I was a punk rocker,” he says. “The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting—I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn’t be commodified. I sort of wanted to not participate in the market around art.”
Instead of looking for a commercial gallery, Tomaselli displayed his pieces at alternative, nonprofit spaces in L.A. In 1985 he’d lost his girlfriend, his job and his lease. He decided “if I’m gonna move, I’m gonna move big.” So he came to New York, which he’d never even visited. With rents in the East Village already out of his league, he ended up in Williamsburg, long before Manhattan hipsters were moving to the Polish-Italian, grimy neighborhood in droves, before you could even buy a New York Times there. “I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with it, but everybody thought it was a really bad idea,” Tomaselli remembers. “They were like, ‘How did you miss Manhattan by two miles?’ and ‘You’ll never get anybody to come over to your studio. You’re going to be one loser artist.’”
