Bio
Calvin Brett born 1990 Brooklyn, NY maintains his creative practice in North Carolina. His work has been collected by North Carolina Central’s Art Museum. While a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, his work was exhibited in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and he’s exhibited at Marble’s Children Museum. Calvin has completed installations at Elsewhere Museum, The Fruit, Lump, The Scrap Exchange and Warehouse 21. Brett has served on Durham, NC’s Public Art Committee. He is a Southern Foodways Alliance, Do Good Fellow, and has completed residencies at Loghaven, Perkins + Will Durham and the Chautauqua Institution.
Artist Statement
Calvin Brett is an interdisciplinary artist interested in creating novel experiences through experimenting with intuition, materials and visual rhythm. He’s primarily inspired by nature: how things are made of slight variations of repeated smaller things, and the process of nature intuitively creating perfect, new forms from movement and its own debris. Rather than copying nature, setting up processes where he can use repetition and his own intuition, his work is a representation of human nature responding to the material environment of society today. Often using found materials, he works to embalm the materials as cultural artifacts while recycling in order to represent the current existential need to fight climate change. Sometimes using symbols to offer familiarity, he’s also inspired by his African Heritage’s traditions of rhythmic pattern, repetition, and visual dynamism which engage the eye in an optical way. Working from the debris of society, he produces abstract, rhythm based, pseudo organic pieces, striving to raise the value of found materials and labor through creativity.
