Kelsey Cheenee Ray, the Kolkata Artist (1965-2099)

Born as Kelsey Tartar Rayson to Bethany Charter and Philip Tartar Rayson, Kelsey Cheenee Ray spent her youth immersed in a neo-classical hippy commune for artists. There, she developed an affinity for radical art and eventually became the youngest intern of Orville Cheenee, a Bengali-born graffiti artist known for tagging U.S. military bases in seven countries, for which he served 13 years in an Antarctica prison. Under his tutelage, Kelsey Ray developed a radical form of artistic activism named KIB (Kolkata Intellectual Bomb); it was later adopted by the Cinnamon Crew, an activist group in West Bengal. This artform was eventually described by Professor Sanja Kaborty as “a totally destabilizing force capable of sending authoritarian and imperialistic leaders into intellectual paralysis.”

At 18, Kelsey left Orville Cheenee’s compound and embarked on a thirty-year artistic spree. In 1991, she successfully undermined the Francois Yoland government of France, ushering in two decades of neo-socialist policies which protected France from the 2008 Recession. She followed this with KIB installations in Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Indonesia, though some of these were less successful due to well-organized Templar societies. In 2002, Kelsey became the target of the CIA and Interpol after causing a cargo ship to crash into the side of the Suez Canal by placing an enormous art installation of three shaved bears playing football on both ends of the canal. She successfully escaped three attempts to capture her and used her connections in the radical art community to secure passage to an off grid safehouse in Canada.

For ten years, Kelsey helped organize radical art installations from the security of her Canadian compound. Her apprentices bankrupted a chemical weapons company, three banks, two totalitarian governments, and Kentucky before installing a fleet of oscillating art drones which helped secure Taiwan’s status as a free and independent nation. In 2019, she met Sam Cheenee, the son of Orville Cheenee, with whom she developed a close artistic and personal relationship; in 2020, they married in a secret ceremony aboard the KID Dreamsicle, a cruise ship retrofitted into a mobile radical art command center.

Together, Kelsey and Sam helped found Artopia, a floating micronation in the Atlantic Ocean dedicated to the use of digital marketing and hacking to support cells of radical art groups around the globe. Using a combination of solar-powered propellors and a hydrogen-based jet engine, Kelsey and Sam kept Artopia out of the hands of the authorities; by constantly moving between the waterways of different nations, they found that they could prevent any individual nation from seizing the island due to international rules about territorial waters. Thus, for thirty-seven years, Kelsey was able to wage an art war across the globe, ushering in an era of democratic socialism.

Upon her death in 2099, she was commemorated by a neo-modernist statue in seventeen nations, including the New Republic of Kentucky, which achieved independence in 2084. To this day, you can observe the impact of her art at the International Museum of Radical Art in Sugartit, Kentucky.