Benji Whalen

The interview was conducted by Ilana Stanger of TheArtBiz.com.

What influenced you to become an artist?

My dad is a painter. My mother is a puppeteer. That was a pretty significant influence. They were part of the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, and I lived with my father on the Bread and Puppet commune for a few years growing up. I have a preference for doing things simply that comes from Bread and Puppet, as well as from my mother’s and father’s aesthetic, along with whatever tiny percent I contributed myself.

You studied English at Columbia and then earned your MFA at San Francisco Art Institute. What led you to an MFA program?

I moved out to California after graduation. I majored in English and I had plans to get an MFA in writing--I thought that I would be a short story writer—-but by the time I moved out to San Francisco I was pursuing visual art as much as writing. I figured I would get more of a graduate school experience in visual arts than in writing, because I hadn’t had art school experience. At Columbia, art was done in a little upstairs corner of campus.

Did the MFA meet your expectations?

Yeah. I got a whole lot out of it. I had a number of strong teachers--Paul Kos, Frances McCormack, John Rapko, and Bruce McGaw in particular. I applied to the Art Institute because I wanted to stay in San Francisco; I wasn’t all that familiar with art schools and really the art world when I was choosing programs. I got lucky, because it turned out to be a place with both a strong painting and a strong conceptual faculty.

Your MFA is in painting though much of your work involves fabric and embroidery. When did you begin working with fabric?

Painting was the program you were in if you did something that went on a wall. I didn’t do more than two or three canvas paintings in graduate school. At the end of my first year I began painting on print fabrics. It was a lot of fun to do. To come to stretched fabric and already have a buzzing visual field of print and to paint on top of that was pretty exhilarating. It’s like putting butter on hot pan—-as soon as you touch it it’s already operating on a hot field. Eventually though I realized paint on fabric was kind of contrived. I’m sounding like a grad student here, but paint wasn’t an integral part of the material, paint was being imposed on it.

Around this time I was in my late grandmother’s house and I was hungry for ideas and stimulation. I began looking at all the embroidery around her house. Every fabric space had some sort of embellishment: pillowcases, cozies, bureau covers, quilts-—everything had really elaborate and beautiful needlework. I’d been in her house a hundred times but I only noticed this then. With my mother’s help I started with basic embroidery stitches, and then I began to embroider for my own ends. When I looked at my embroidered work I felt that only I could’ve made it. That’s a great place to be in art.

Has working in embroidery changed your reception as an artist?

It varies. Some people will have a preference for painting, and that’s an obstacle to anyone working in a craft tradition. It still feels unique to me when I work in embroidery, but it’s always a challenge. That feeling that your work could only come from you only lasts for so long. You have to continue to make things in new ways so that you don’t get overly familiar with the output.

Is the alphabet quilt an ongoing project?

I’ve done five complete quilts. Each quilt has different images for each letter. At this point I’ve done them as commissions. I probably wouldn’t create another on my own.

How do you get your commissions?

Some come through my gallery here, Gallery Paule Anglim, or through people I’ve worked with in New York. I also work with a gallery in Western Massachusetts, Geoffrey Young Gallery. Geoff doesn’t represent artists but he’s been a real source of interest in my work-—he’s very active in the New York art world.

I noticed you had several shows with Geoffrey Young Gallery, as well as with Southern Exposure in San Francisco. Do you make an effort to maintain a relationship with these galleries?

I’m not as focused on galleries as I probably should be. There’s always a sense when making art that you ought to be more careerist. Sometimes I run into other artists who make me feel I should be taking a more mercenary approach. I happen to like the people I work with--Geoff Young, Paule Anglim, and her director, Ed Gilbert, are people I would be in touch with whether or not I was showing work in their gallery. But I don’t spend my days haunting art galleries, which sometimes you feel you ought to do.

How have you gotten your shows?

During the summer here some commercial galleries put on “introductions” where they shows artists who are fresh out of school and haven’t had commercial shows. I got into one of those straight out of graduate school, and hit it off with the gallery [Gallery Paule Anglim]. I had my first San Francisco solo show there a couple of years later. Some others shows have come out of that show, and some shows are linked to friends and visits that people made during graduate school, and others are mostly word of mouth.

How do you currently support yourself?

I have a part-time job with a big bank downtown. It’s extremely corporate, but the people I work with are great and very supportive of the schedule I’ve carved out. I work in the mornings and go to my studio in the afternoon. Sometimes it’s nice to move through such different worlds. It’s refreshing and relaxing to be in an environment where nobody cares so much about art or the ultimately indefinable things art galleries deal in. It’s straightforward, which keeps things in perspective.

I do have anxiety about art as a career. I keep a file labeled “art biz.” The title is partly ironic, because it’s so not a business in that you’re totally wrapped up in what you’re producing. But sometimes I use the idea of art as business as a way to steel yourself in what would otherwise be a vulnerable situation. When you’re submitting work, seeking the approval of others, and entering the entirely subjective and often dubious process of succeeding commercially, then it can help to look at art as a business. It’s much easier to accept rejections or lost opportunities if it’s just business.

What advice would you give to emerging artists?

It depends what they’re emerging from. The only advice I could ever give from the slightly emerged place I’m in is to make work that contents you, that gives you satisfaction and motivation. Graduate school is a great place to be, but as in academia it’s kind of a false environment. You have all these people interested in what you do, and when you make work there’s a response. There’s this ongoing back and forth, which is the great thing about school. When you’re out of school it becomes more important to really make work that makes you happy. The audience is farther away. You have fewer people telling you what they honestly think. Even if you’re selling work you’re not getting the same dialogue or the simple satisfaction of an immediate response. You have to be able to live with work and really sustain yourself with the way you work as opposed to making work and taking satisfaction from the response. You have to be getting something out of the process.

It’s also crucial to find time to make work. Try to structure your life in ways that give you the opportunity to pursue art, because it’s very rare that the opportunity to make art will just fall into your lap. Everybody assumes that you are going to go to work at some point of the day. No one assumes you will make art. You have to make that a priority.

This article was originally created for TheArtBiz.com. It appears on NYFA Interactive courtesy of the Abigail Rebecca Cohen Library.