ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Ben Roosevelt is a Honolulu-based artist whose sculptural and installation practice has been shown in museums and contemporary art spaces across the United States and internationally. His work uses ordinary objects and familiar materials from contemporary Hawai‘i to register the overlap of local life, consumer culture, and the improvisation of making ends meet. Roosevelt’s projects have appeared at the High Museum of Art, MOCA GA, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, as well as TULCA in Ireland and the Putting Lot in New York. The artist recently participated in Abstract Mind in Korea (2026).

Roosevelt’s practice has been recognized with residencies at HMK in the Netherlands and the Hambidge Center for the Arts in Georgia, along with awards from the Forward Arts Foundation and the Arts Council of Ireland. His work and projects have been featured in New American Paintings, The Village Voice, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Circa Art Magazine, and The Irish Times, among other publications. He holds an MFA from the National University of Ireland, Galway, an MTS from Vanderbilt University, and a BA in Religion from the University of the South, Sewanee.

STATEMENT

My artwork comes from living inside overlapping fantasies and realities. In Hawai‘i, the everyday is local, Pacific, American, Asian, diasporic, hyper-capitalized, sacred, tacky, militarized, tragic, and exhausting all at once. I work with things that circulate through that atmosphere: slippers, grocery bags, takeout containers, cardboard Amazon boxes, side tables, mosquito screens, termite tents, shopping centers, drainage canals, retaining walls, habits, errands, and small repeated encounters. I like to collect, alter, and rearrange materials that are not meant to last——things that hold, carry, cover, protect, advertise, decay, or pass through——but that still leave a trace.

I get lost in the layers of Honolulu, of neighborhoods and communities, of the humor and pressures of local life. My work is experimental and unsure. I work toward forms that feel mixed up and unstable, and I present artworks that give me pause or pose a problem. I feel a sense of truth when it’s hard to separate celebration from criticism.

I debuted this new website in 2025. From March to June 2026, Bright Side was in a show called Hand, Material, Mind in Atlanta, and in April 2026, Go Buy was in another a show called Abstract Mind at CICA Museum in Korea.