Although it’s laced more with musings on dysfunctional family ties and hard-knocks upbringing than his emergence into the New York City art world, Joe Andoe’s memoir Jubilee City does edify on why one pursues art and vice versa. It reads how I imagine Dukes of Hazzard might’ve played out if Luke and Bo had gone to art school—in a good way.

How Andoe, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, native arrived at art in the first place is odd. Where most artists come to it following a childhood dream, he admits it was because he discovered the teacher in his Tulsa Junior College art class sold his watercolors for $900 each—and he thought he could paint just as well as his teacher.

However, 25 years later, his commitment to a career in visual art remains; Andoe’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, among other venues, and his short stories have been published as well in journals Open City, Bomb and Bald Ego. Particularly interesting in Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed are stories of the NYC gallery scene, crooked art dealers and pseudo-artists.

Check out some of Andoe’s paintings and prints at www.joeandoe.com.