Photo: John Falls
Ben curates and builds ongoing community sourced public art projects that combine skateboarding, education, construction, music, media, and visual art as a socially-engaged platform. As a process, he invites artists and community members to weekly interactive, spontaneous sessions where their combined energies and diverse backgrounds enrich the developing art spaces.
Ben is co-founder of DC’s Green Skate Laboratory and one of the founding members of the now legendary DC Fight Club, an underground skate park, gallery, and performing arts venue. In 2012 he produced Finding A Line for the DC temporary public art initiative 5x5 by building a skate/art park under a dicey DC freeway underpass and in 2015 co-developed another iteration of Finding A Line with the Kennedy Center. The Finding a Line project is now part of the DC Cultural Plan and the city’s multiyear – arts and culture forward – creative placemaking initiative, “Crossing the Street: Building DC’s Inclusive Future through Creative Placemaking”.
Ben’s community art practice has been the subject of various publications, including NPR, McSweeney’s, the Washington Post, Jazz Times, BBC, ARTnews, JUICE, Landscape Architecture, and National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He received his MFA from George Mason University School of Art where he is also Sculpture Faculty and teaches Art as Social Action and Public Art Projects. Ben is a core member of Workingman Collective and ECRW, a loose coalition of surfer, skater, educator, builder, citizen artists.
CV - Click here and contact: bashwort@gmu.edu