An Interview with Brandon Hill

In preparation for his artist talk at PAR-Projects (Cincinnati) on Saturday February 21st, Gabi Roach sits down with Brandon Hill to discuss everything from his inspiration to various processes of art making in today’s political climate.

Brandon Hill is a contemporary, Washington D.C. based, American artist. Drawing inspiration from his "fascination with materiality, history and the urban landscape," Hill creates works in an array of media from painting and sculpture, to public art projects that include murals and multi-disciplinary performances. I had the opportunity to sit down with artist Brandon to talk about his journey as an artist, what motivates him to make art, and the challenges he has faced in making art his full-time profession.

GR: What is your first memory of being an artist?

BH: There was a show called "Secret City" with Commander Mark. It was on PBS. It wasn't like Bob Ross but it was similar in that it was teaching art. Commander Mark would start with a square then he would teach you how to make it three dimensional.”

GR: From there, Commander Mark would imagine, draw and develop, on the fly, an entire landscape, first using basic geometric shapes, layering and refining as the program continued.

BH: He built entire cities out of circles, squares, rectangles, tubes… and he’d be talking, doing a voice over, the entire time like “oh, I’m going to add an alien, and he needs a house” and then he [Commander Mark] would draw the house.

I remember having a real confidence because of that show... and aggressively going through sketchbooks thinking, "yeah, I'm an artist!

GR: Looking back, what are some major steppingstones in your journey to becoming a practicing, contemporary artist?

BH: I entered a competition in high school. I didn’t go to an art school….my high school didn’t have any art classes at the time. I went to a school called Boys Latin in Baltimore, Maryland.

GR: Hill submitted a portrait drawing to a feeder competition which ultimately took him to the ACT-SO (Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) national conference in New Orleans. This was a trip that would have a profound impact on Hill’s desire to pursue art seriously.

BH: It was the first time I got to compete for art and the first time that I had gotten to travel alone [fondly remembering his mostly unsupervised trip to Burbon Street].

I didn't win but I remember not caring… it was a lot of those feelings of just doing it, shooting your shot. It was the first time I understood where I fit too. Art is so subjective sometimes that you don’t know where you fit, even just from a skill perspective.

GR: Cognizant of business and an entrepreneur by nature, Hill began exhibiting right out of college.

BH: You’re not really taught the business of art. You get out into the world, and you are kind of like this starving artist but none of the industries that sell to artists are starving. You don’t know where to get experience, you don’t know what you should do for free, you don’t know what you should do for spec, and people are just telling you to get exposure which is something you die form in the wilderness.

Right out of college, I put a painting in a coffee shop called Xando Coffee Shop on Charles Street. It's no longer there in Baltimore.... It can't be more typical of something you see on tv. I got a call from a curator at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. He asked if I had a studio and I said yeah but I didn't. My dad's a carpenter so if you went our house at any given time, there were stacks of wood and materials, and this helped [make a convincing makeshift studio].

GR: With a space locked down, Hill created a new body of work, mostly stencil work, for his appointment with the curator from the Lewis Museum. And the studio visit went very well because from here, Brandon was offered a commission project for the Museum.

BH: This was my first commission, my first project, my first museum show, my first anything. And it was the most money I'd ever made from art at the time - it was like 8 grand. So that was a pretty big deal. It didn't launch my career but looking back, it was the first time I was being paid [to make art], that I had to make a schedule, had to be on time, had to figure out the flow and deal with the emotions and feelings of working... not in your own studio.

GR: Hill worked on a 24’ x 8’ panel mural in the loading dock of the Lewis Museum. At the time, he worked at the Baltimore aquarium, which was close by so after his shifts, Hill would walk to the Reginald to paint, getting to know the staff but also becoming accustomed to painting for an audience.

BH: Most art is made in isolation, and it’s made at your speed, on your time, around your mess and its ready for the world to see when you are ready for the world to see it. It’s a hard adjustment to know that people can see all your mistakes. It's hard to wrap your head around people seeing your stuff imperfectly and having the courage to get through that anyway.

GR: Hill’s next project, “The Document” would teach him even more about the cosmically amusing intersection of self-direction, destiny, and of the business (and politics) of the art world. A collaboration with 7 other artists including visual artists and dancers, the final pieces of “The Document” create a collection of large-scale paintings produced through the movements of breakdance. On trying to find venues to show the work, Hill explains,

BH: I knew it was going to be a fishing expedition. We had no credentials, no one knows who we are and we are pitching something very experimental.

We were kind of slick. We didn't have any money for hotels so we'd pick cities, anywhere you could get within 8 hours. Every other week we would pick a city and get on a bus at 11pm. That's your hotel. You wake up in your host city and walk the city.

GR: Hill and his project partners continued this way, approaching over 150 - 200 venues on the Eastern seaboard. No one called back, initially. Though the work would eventually be shown at the District of Columbia Arts Center (among other places) and even covered in the Washington Post, the process had a profound impact on the way Hill began to think about opportunity, business and schemas of success in the art world.

BH: I became so jaded during this process that it hardened me. I began to think the solution was less about 'getting the big record deal' and instead, I became empowered to go do the pop-up.”

GR: Hill asked himself, “what is a gallery?” It’s a space where people come to see the work. It doesn’t have to be white walls, cheese and the like. Hill began thinking about non-traditional exhibition spaces, public art, and matching the need with your resources and abilities.

BH: There are a million artists trying to get into galleries but not a million people trying to rent a bowling alley. All these people outside of [the art] world are not judging me. They’re like, “come bring your wacky doodle!” At that time, it started to get my brain to think abstractly about spaces.

GR: Why do you make art? What does it do for you?

BH: If I wasn't an artist, I would have been a baker. I like using my hands. I can't turn my brain off. I wake up with stuff in my head and I have to draw it. Often I don't even draw it, I write it down.

Art has a word. If you do it professionally, it’s artist. But even before that word existed, humans were making art. We can’t not make art as humans – people were decorating bows and arrows. Differently. And why? I don’t know. Was it spiritual was it just because?

I think about the fact that I use aerosol and that's a pretty modern technology to compress air and put it and pigment in a can. But if you look at the handprints in the Cave of Gargas in France, 30,000-years ago people were chewing up pigments and spitting it [new colors]. What is that - that's aerosol? So, one of the first paintings on earth is a stencil. You can make a straight line from that to Shepard Ferry. Was he inspired by it, no [probably not], but people come up with the same solutions. And [some] people just like “pretty.” We decorate, we like to understand the world, and we have to do it with our hands.

GR: Describe your art and your making process.

BH: I'm not a studio everyday guy. I'm a studio twice a week and a binge person. And I like systems. I'm not old but I'm old enough to know how my brain works. The idea of a Matryoshka doll fascinates me. What can you put around the thing, what can you put in the thing, and how can something stack – that’s so important to me.

I'm always trying to see what the material can do, how far can I push it. Can I attach it to an idea and can that idea live on multiple levels?

GR: When speaking about his murals, Hill adds…

BH: In my head, sculptures and murals are in one bucket and flat paintings are in another buckets. To me murals are not larger versions of flat paintings. They're more like big sculptures. And I know it sounds strange, but flat paper is actually flat. A wall is not flat. You're [painting around] the recesses of bricks and grout, you're going around pipes and architectural features, trying to figure out what the materials can do."

GR: How does your art address today's America?

BH: I'm African American and I'm an artist. I've always wrestled with am I a Black artist? Does that mean your topics are inherently “Blacker?” Or am I just an artist and I happen to be Black? I've realized it's all of the above. You have to tap topics from what you naturally think about. And I have thought about it.

GR: In his 2020 exhibition, “Black Cowboy” Hill explored these ideas further. Influenced by a book he was gifted by his brother entitled “Black Cowboys of Texas” by Sara R. Massey, Hill was inspired to create artwork about history, its simplification and the subsequent erasure of its complexities.

BH: I remember reading in the first paragraph of the first chapter, 1 in 4 cowboys were Black. When I read that statistic, it was so mind blowing because every movie I've seen in my entire life a Black guy on a horse is some type of oddity. Like everyone in town stops what they're doing... But when you read that statistic, [a Black man on a horse] could not have been an alien sight that caused everyone to stop what they're doing. It meant you [or we] were part of civic life in every facet. In that exact moment, I realized everything I knew about the Old West was wrong. And why is that important?  Because if America has a mascot, it’s definitely a cowboy. This took me down this vein of work where I started to think about erasure [of Black history].

There wasn't just a Black cowboy. There were tens of thousands of ex-slaves going out West as pioneers. But my culture is not largely thought of like that. Drawing a straight line to today, when I hear about Jackie Robinson's service record being stripped from the D.O.D.'s website, I'm like, ok got it. It's very discomforting to hear that but it’s not new. There's a long history of not only erasure but also black and white thinking.

As I get older, I feel a burden of responsibility to get it right -if you can get it right. You'd make more money if you did nothing political. And it's easy to look back in time and to say something is safe.

I think about "The Problem We All Live With" by Norman Rockwell. It's the painting of Ruby Bridges being walked to school. It's one of my favorite pieces on planet earth and for a while, I didn't know that his career was threatened at the time because he made that piece. When I look at it, it's a whimsical painting of a Black kid but that painting almost got him railroaded. In hindsight, it’s completely silly because Norman Rockwell is the biggest thing since sliced bread. But I constantly think about that because part of our job as artists is to get it right... there is a tendency to look at artists and think we are benevolent but in the absence of digital printing every Mussolini and Hitler poster that we look at, an artist made. We're not just good guys by default. Art is not inherently benevolent because it's aesthetically pretty - we have a power and there's a real responsibility to make sure you get it right.

GR: You have done projects for Jameson and several major league sports teams like The Nationals and The Capitals. What words of wisdom do you have for artists seeking commercial success?

BH: Artists will build so many boxes around themselves and they don’t even know it. I've met artists that think they are free thinkers, but they have these ideas of how they want to get successful and who they won't work for and what they won't do and what materials they won't use. Early on, I was the same, I didn’t want to work for corporations. But sometimes, that kind of thing doesn’t shake out. If you use paint from Sherwin Williams, you’re buying a product from the man – it’s a multi-billion-dollar corporation, right? Or if you say, I won’t use glitter because glitter isn’t real art. Well, that doesn’t pan out either. I remember once upon a time when they said graffiti wasn’t fine art but you can’t be bigger than Shepard Fairey right now.

GR: Hill continued, explaining that for him, there are deal breakers. He won’t sell his own work to or do projects for cigarette companies. He advised young artists to ask themselves tough questions because “cookie-cutter questions will not give you any insight.” But simultaneously, he urged artists to also shy away from putting too many boxes around themselves if they’re seeking commercial success. And to think of yourself not only as an artist, but as a person who practices a creative trade.

BH: The stigma and dogma around fine art is so disconnected from reality. In reality, before Andy Warhol became Andy Warhol, he was working on ads for Tiffany & Co. There’s nothing wrong with thinking of yourself as a fine artist – you make weird stuff in the studio – and then also as a service provider, a tradesperson. The differentiation between commercial and fine art is helpful because [the labels] help us distinguish how the two get funded but your job as an artist is just to create new ideas and move the conversation forward. And to get it [the work] out there. Because if you don’t get it out there, you are failing at part of your job.

Brandon Hill is a contemporary, Washington D.C. based, American artist, creating works in an array of media from painting and sculpture, to public art projects that include murals and multi-disciplinary performances.

Join us on Saturday February 21st for his artist talk in The Gallery at Studeō PAR. Link below to reserve your seat.

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