Mark Bennett – artist – Brief Article
S.G.
Turns TV favorites into blueprint artworks
In August 1995, Mark Bennett had had enough. A struggling artist fresh out of a relationship, he was in the bar of a Los Angeles restaurant, hanging his architectural drawings of the homes of TV families such as the Bradys and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, and he recalls making himself a promise: “I told myself if I could sell enough work, I was going to move to Arizona and change my name,” he remembers.
And voila! A week later Los Angeles art dealer Christopher Ford saw the blueprints–which turn TV fantasy (such as the I Dream of Jeonnie bottle) into architectural surreality–and offered Bennett his own gallery show.
Since then, Bennett’s work has appeared in distinguished museums like the Corcoran, the Walker Art Center, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This past fall he received the ultimate stamp of approval when New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his blueprints. “It was something that I did not expect,” Bennett says. “Fantasizing about the television was a way of escape, and those drawings were my escape.”
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COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
