The North Dakota Museum of Art and the late Barton Lidice Benes have been friends since 1988 when Barton designed the Museum’s Donor Wall and Gift Shop. In September 1989, his work filled the Mezzanine gallery for teh Museum’s grand opening. Other exhibitions followed in 1995 and 2004. In 1997, the Museum commissioned Benes to create a “flood museum” comprised of metaphor-laden, flood damaged objects contributed by the people of Grand Forks. Now the Museum has dismantled his New York City apartment with its treasure trove and reassembled it in that same gallery. Rare works of African, Egyption, and contemporary art join ranks with the arcane, the wistful, the amusing, and the deeply serious in Barton’s personal Cabinet of Wonders.
Barton Lidice Benes was born in Westwood, New Jersey, November 16, 1942, and educated in the early 1960s at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Benes became internationally known in the 1980s as a “money artist” when he used recycled currency as a collage medium on sculptural and flat forms. In 1989, Benes had his first solo show in North Dakota as part of the grand opening of the North Dakota Museum of Art in its new home, a renovated 1907 gymnasium on the campus of the University of North Dakota. More recently, Barton began making “Museum Pieces,” displays of collectible objects (often belonging to well-known personalities) and relics, which he mounted, labeled, and placed in museum-like containers. The North Dakota Museum of Art’s Donor Wall, created by Barton, exemplifies this style. Another similar work, Ebb Tide, made collaboratively with eighty Grand Forks residents, was commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art following the 1997 flood.
Not only did Benes make art, he collected it as well. In 1970, he took his first trip to Africa. Masks, sculptures, fetishes and any number of other mysterious African works made their way back across the ocean into his 850 square-foot apartment in New York’s West Village. Then Barton began to accumulate Egyptian, Pre-Columbian, Amazonian, and New Guinean works. Gifts followed: a voodoo altar from Nigeria, another rare African mask, an insect collection by American artist Jennifer Angus. Finally, he made his last acquisition, a red-lacquered Chinese opium bedchamber.
In 2005, it was announced in the New York Times that when Mr. Benes dies, his home, with its collection of wonders, will be taken apart and reconstructed at the North Dakota Museum of Art as a permanent installation, a twenty-first century artist studio and the Museum’s first period room.
His work is included in the collections of The Chicago Art Institute, the National Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the New York Public Library, the Federal Reserve Board, the National Museum of American Art in Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art, the Agnelli Collection in Italy, the Albuquerque Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in France, the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Delaware Art Museum, the Greenville County Museum of Art, Kent State University, Harvard University, Hofstra Museum, the Malmo Museum, McGill University, the Museum of Fine Arts in Wisconsin, Princeton University, Rutgers University, the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Florida, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the University of New Mexico, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. He was featured in Artnews, Art in America, Arts Magazine, and the New York Times as well as in the documentary films, Gay Sex in the 70s and Barton Benes: No Secrets. He was represented by the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City and Galleri Andersson/Sandström in Stockholm.
