Paul Stephen Benjamin

Dec 12

Paul Stephen Benjamin

b. 1966, Chicago
lives in Atlanta

Multimedia artist Paul Stephen Benjamin earned a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA from Georgia State University, Atlanta. The color black features prominently—nearly exclusively—in his work, particularly in his paintings and in his large installations of obsolete televisions, which play images of and audio from African American icons such as Beyoncé, Eldridge Cleaver, Aretha Franklin, Lil Wayne, Condoleezza Rice, and Nina Simone. Benjamin is focused on the pervasive connotations of the color black in society, culture, and language, and in concepts of identity, power, and authority. He is engaged in an ongoing investigation of the meaning and value of the color, but rather than conduct research alone, he takes viewers along on this inquiry. He asks: What came first, black as an agent or as a product? His work discusses the complex dynamics among culture, society, and what is, in fact, the absence of color. Recent exhibitions include State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum and The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas (2020); Great Force, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, (2019); Pure, Very, New, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2019); and Reinterpreting the Sound of Blackness, Telfair Museums, Savannah (2018).