Still Wild About Harry
A retrospective celebrates Silver City icon Harry Benjamin and reveals a life in art beyond his signature landscapes.
By Donna Clayton Lawder
"Oh, it's just crazy, crazy I tell you!"
Harry Benjamin is trying to describe just some of the facets of his life as a longtime artist in Silver City. He steps quickly through "What's a Pot Shop," his combination home, studio and gallery, pointing out some of the works headed for his upcoming retrospective show at the Silver City Museum, which kicks off July 1 and will run through the summer.
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Harry Benjamin outside his gallery home. |
There are no dividing lines between where the gallery ends and the kitchen begins, where the bedroom leaves off and public space starts. It's all public, and it's all very personal, too.
In addition to pieces by folks like Kate Brown and Horace Cordova, the place is chock full of Benjamin's own works—from his well-known sizeable landscapes, like this month's Desert Exposure cover painting, to quirky stuff like "The Marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head." Getting ready for the museum exhibit, he's been gathering works he did long ago, abstracts the likes of which his many current fans may never have seen.
He moves like lightning around the place, pointing out one painting after another, one pot after another, a sculpture here and there, an odd decoration—all have connections to the phases of his own life and art or the people he's loved. Often it's both. While many of the works he's pointing out in the big gallery room are his own, others in his collection—more centered in his living space—are by the many, many friends he's been close to over his decades in Silver City.
His years of creating art, helping to start up the Silver City Museum and serving as its first curator (see the June Desert Exposure), his beloved teachers at Western New Mexico University who went on to become cherished friends, his fellow artists working to make their living through art—it's all a tapestry, or maybe a crazy-quilt of sorts: Pull a thread here and find it attached to something, or rather someone over there.
He stops in front of one of his own huge works, a painting in which a group of people is standing around, their feet strangely not quite touching the ground. He points out one young woman in the group, the daughter of another friend.
"So, then she married Jacqueline's son (former Silver City coffeeshop maven Jacqueline Shaw) and things got even more complicated!" Benjamin says. He throws up his hands and raises his eyebrows in an expression of comic exasperation, then smiles and adds sweetly, "Or perhaps I should say things got 'wonderfully complex.'"
He continues wandering through the home/gallery, showing the works he's collected by his many friends.
"That's Jason Willaford's first encaustic," he says proudly of the painting made from a wax and pigment medium. Jason and Ree Willaford owned and ran Galleri Urbane in Silver City for several years before moving their life and work to Marfa, Texas, about three years ago. "And that's Camille's puppy," he says and points out a work by the Willafords' young daughter, "and that's her rabbit." Though the paintings were done when the child was perhaps just entering kindergarten, they display a touch uncommon in a four-year-old. Benjamin's face lights up.
"Yes, yes, you see it, don't you?" he asks. "She's got talent. You can see it already." He beams with a sort of grandfatherly pride.
He points out work by other friends, so many friends. That's Cecil Howard, beloved teacher and dear friend; that's Aria deCapa, his featured artist for Weekend at the Galleries for 10 years, now living in New Orleans; that's a photograph by pinhole photography artist, author and teacher Eric Renner; that's Marilyn Howard's wall.
He whisks quickly down a short hallway into another room.
"Kate's here for the anniversary," he says, explaining that the pottery of longtime friend Kate Brown is on display once again at What's a Pot. "Oh, and this is Horace, Horace Cordova."
Leaving almost no time at all to actually take in Cordova's pottery pieces and traditional-style religious wall hangings, Benjamin trips back out through the short hallway and points out a bulletin board at the top of the entryway stairs. "Here were are, the three of us, Cecil (Howard), Horace (Cordova) and I, more years ago than I really want to think about," he says with a small laugh. A newspaper clipping, slightly yellowed with age, shows the three young artists under a heading "The Way We Were."
And then Benjamin is off to the back gallery again, hollering over his shoulder, "Let me show you some of the things that will be in the museum show."
Having been key to starting up the Silver City Museum and being its first curator, Benjamin was a logical choice to anchor its 40th anniversary celebration, which just so happens to coincide with Benjamin's own What's a Pot Shop's 25-year mark. Born at Silver City's old Hillcrest Hospital in 1945, raised in Bayard (where his father was "the man who wore the star," operating a Texaco gas station) and educated at WNMU, his life and career encapsulate the recent history of Grant County's roller-coaster ride to artistic prominence. Getting his works together for the big exhibit has been a powerful experience for him, he says, remembering the phases of his life in which the various artworks were created, the friends and family members associated with the memories.
He steps into a small area off the big gallery room, and hauls out a rather abstract painting, the background mostly off-white, with lines of gray and other earth tones.
"This, I think, is going into the show," he says. "It's a painting I did back in college, a painting of a dead bird, actually." He hangs it on the wall, filling a blank space, then looks down at the floor.
"Oh no. Oh, this is weird," he says, and stoops to pick something up from beneath the painting. "It's a dead bird." He eyes the small stiff object in his hand, then looks at the painting. "This is weird. That's a painting of a dead bird, and here's a dead bird on the floor under where I hung it." He goes to toss the bird outside, shaking his head, muttering, "Weird, just weird."
Having disposed of the bird, Benjamin leads the way back through his What's a Pot Shop. He pauses to point out some artwork along the way, one grouping hanging around his bed.
Asked what it's like to live in his own gallery, he says, "Just like when I lived in the upstairs of the museum for 10 years, except there I could close my bedroom door."
Here, the bed is unobtrusive—low to the ground and covered with a dark, muted spread—but, still, it's a bed.
"Well, I always make sure to make it up," Benjamin says with a mischievous smile. On a shelf at the foot of the bed is a collection of items—a conquistador, perhaps, made into a lamp, an Indian princess, a Roman soldier with sword and a cartoon-like plastic penguin that looks like it must have a light bulb inside.
"Sometimes it's the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruent items that makes it happen," he says, and continues on through the place, finally plopping down at a small computer desk near the kitchen. The shelves above the desk are piled high with books, papers and assorted curiosities.
"I call this my office," he says with a smile and shake of his head. "Pretty grandiose word for what it is, don't you think?"
He pulls up photos on his computer's screen, showing pictures of many of the friends he's been talking about. He pulls up the photo of a young man whose wake was held right here. He recalls a party that went on into the wee hours, and revelers who'd continued after Benjamin turned in for the night greeting him with glassy eyes in the morning and the announcement that at one point in the long night, one young man present had proposed marriage.
Benjamin muses on the power of Silver City to draw together an artist community that, even with its ebbs and flows, has always been "a strong community, a good community."
He says, "We've had so many art associations over the years." He mentions various groups and their cooperative galleries. "The San Vicente Artists group started right here in this room," he adds with a gesture that includes his kitchen and this part of the gallery.
"I've been very lucky. I've had an all-art career," he says. "I've taught art (Snell junior high and Santa Clara elementary) and I've worked at the museum and in galleries. And all the time, always making pots and painting."
Most folks, at least locally and these days, know him for his breathtaking landscapes of mammoth proportions. Asked if it's true that he determines his pricing by how many bushes and trees he puts in a painting, Benjamin bursts into an explosive laugh.
"Oh, dear, no! That's a joke!" he exclaims. "Oh, yes, and then there's the other one—that I charge by the square foot!"
Right now, he says, most of his work is in commissions. After these pieces are done, however, Benjamin says he'll be starting a new body of work to present over this October's Weekend at the Galleries.
Landscapes? Abstracts? More Potato Heads, perhaps? Benjamin smiles that mischievous smile.
"Something completely different," he teases. "I
really can't wait to get started!"
He reflects on his retrospective at the museum, an exhibit that will contain precious few landscapes, he says. "I'm looking forward to it. I'm hoping to see a lot of my old friends there. I'm looking into getting my mother up here for this," he says, allowing that the lady is now well into her 80s. "My parents have always supported everything I did. They came to every show I ever had, and I want to get her out here for this thing."
He's also looking forward to seeing such a vast array of his work from over his life as an artist all gathered together, reminders of all those friends, all those artists from over the years.
Benjamin gets a wistful look.
"You know, there are so many people to remember. So many who helped me with the museum. So many who helped me with the galleries," he says. He begins counting on his fingers, then despairs of coming up with any such number, and laughs.
"We were just a bunch of friends, running around together, doing things together," he says. "We all thought it was just so much fun! That's why we did it. It was fun."
Harry Benjamin smiles and shrugs, then adds, "I mean, if it's not fun, why do it?"
The Harry Benjamin retrospective opens July 1 with a reception from 2-4 p.m. at the Silver City Museum. The show will be part of the museum's 40th anniversary celebration at its annual ice-cream social, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on July 4. Admission is free, with tickets sold for refreshments and games. 312 W. Broadway, 538-5921, www.silvercitymuseum.org. What's a Pot Shop is at 300 N. Arizona St., 388-2007, www.harrybenjamin.com.
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure.