Joseph Furr

Joseph Furr (November 17, 1953 - May 29, 1973) was a Baltimore painter who was so committed to his art that he stopped laboring for a paycheck, eating only roaches during the summer of 1973.
Records of his existence are spotty, but several facts illustrate the course of his life. On May 29 1973, concerned neighbors at a warehouse on East Oliver Street complained of a bad smell coming from his efficiency. The landlord had received many complaints about Mr. Furr in the previous month. Reports of him climbing up the storm drain to get into his apartment, strange noises at night, a sudden infestation of cockroaches in neighboring apartments, and the sound of chopping were all reported to the landlord at various times. After the complaints of the cockroach infestation, maintenance men found Mr. Furr lying dead in his apartment when coming to fumigate. The landlord subsequently contacted the Baltimore Police Department. They found no evidence of trauma on the body, although a singular dilated pupil led the authorities to suspect heart failure.
In a sweep of the otherwise bare apartment, the landlord and the police located Mr. Furr’s paintings and art supplies, his clothing, 20 stacks of books, and a refrigerator empty apart from 6 glass jars full of roach carcasses. The puzzled law enforcement officials then took Joseph Furr to St. Agnes Hospital, where a routine autopsy revealed elevated levels of allethrin, a synthetic compound found in commercial insecticides, in his blood. The morgue physician initially suspected deliberate poisoning. However, after Mr. Furr’s large intestine yielded partially-digested roach remains, it became apparent that he had deliberately ingested roaches which, presumably unbeknownst to him, had been exposed to a household insecticide.
Records from Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, MD indicate that Mr. Furr is inhumed in lot #110, an irregularly-shaped sepulcher towards the center of the graveyard, paid for by the an anonymous benefactor. His grave can be visited today, and is marked by a squat, beige stone near the rear of the graveyard. He isn't the most notorious member of the cemetery, but competes with the infamous John Wilkes Booth (Abraham Lincoln's assassin.)
Shortly after his death, most of his artwork was inherited by his sister, Kathleen Peoples. Mrs. Peoples, a Christian fundamentalist, described the paintings as offensive; she is believed to have destroyed them shortly after Mr. Furr’s death.
A cache of his artwork was found by a small group of warehouse tenants, who moved into the space which in 1973 Furr had rented, in 2006. Apparently, in the large closet Furr had buried two paintings and a small tooled box behind a rotted insulation board. The first consisted of a series of crisscrossing lines with the title “self-portrait” written in what later forensic analysis revealed to be Furr’s own semen mixed with a carbonate powder. The second painting was a detailed study of latrine microflora, and had metallic copper tubes as the main background. The final piece was a wooden cube with grotesque faces carved in high relief, painted red. These pieces are currently on display at Baltimore’s Oddities Museum at the East Oliver Gallery.

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