BARTON BENES | AMERICAN PIE

Channeling the culture of Surrealism and Dada, Benes upends our perceptions of utilitarianism by inventing new, almost supernatural languages of meaning for everyday objects, often referencing ideological issues and social concerns that were personal to his own life and experiences. Benes spent over 40 years in New York’s West Village, where he lived and worked in a studio at Westbeth. As an HIV-positive man, Benes became a social advocate for those suffering from the illness, and served on the board of Visual-Aids. He received numerous awards, including a 1978 Ariana Foundation Award for Art in Mixed Media, a 1983 Rutgers University Vorhees Grant for Printmaking, and a 1988 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Benes exhibited extensively with solo shows at the North Dakota Museum of Art (NDMOA), Allan Stone Gallery, and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, and group exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, Queens Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, among others. Benes’ work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, and Museum of Modern Art, New York. After his untimely death in 2012 from kidney complications, Benes’ studio was reproduced in its entirety at the NDMOA.