Seth Cameron, April 2020. Watercolor and gouache on paper. 5 x 7 in.
Of all the artists in the world who wear multiple hats, Seth Cameron is clearly among the most innovative and thoughtful. After co-founding the celebrated artist collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation, he served as President of its tuition-free experimental art school, BHQFU, from 2009 to 2017. There he naturally combined a challenging set of skills: teacher, administrator, fund-raiser, artistic goad and all-around Mister Fixit. During and since, Cameron has taught sculpture, drawing, and interdisciplinary studies at Cooper Union and lectured across the country, all the while writing and exhibiting his own mostly abstract paintings under his own name.
It was not, therefore, altogether surprising when Cameron was named Executive Director of New York’s Children’s Museum of the Arts in January of 2020. Just two months after assuming the helm of the beloved museum, the pandemic hit NYC with the force of a category five hurricane. Quarantined, living away from his wife and kids, and charged with keeping afloat a small but highly respected institution, he worked the phone and email tirelessly, while painting a suite of Turneresque landscapes that serve as both thank you gifts to institutional donors and reflections of the artist’s state of mind during the pandemic.
I leave it to Cameron to explain further:
“This group of small gouache landscapes was made indoors, without reference to a particular setting of the sun. This much is typical of how I work. What isn't typical for me is that these paintings are postcards, the verso of each having a note of thanks to someone who made a much needed gift to Children's Museum of the Arts in the month immediately following the mandated closure, when the museum was truly on the brink. For me painting is generally a solitary experience connected to an abstract, rather than a particular sense of humanity. And I think philanthropy often feels that way too. But it felt important to honor this moment of ‘social distancing’ with intimacy and with the fragility of representation.”
— CVF, USFCAM
