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 Brett Cook has engaged in community-based projects focusing on such diverse subjects as spirituality, poets and intellectuals, politics, wellness, and place. Brett connects his work to exceptionally wide audiences using participatory ethnographic strategies, progressive educational pedagogy, and community organizing. Concurrent with a practice manifested in public projects since 1984, Brett's work has been shown at museums and galleries since 1991. His public works have been executed in the United States from California to Maine, and internationally in Brazil, Barbados, and Mexico.Cook's art has been recognized and included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and Anacostia Museum; galleries in New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco; and universities in Arizona, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, and Ohio. Brett's work in museums and galleries takes on a variety of skillfully crafted forms, with a recurrent emphasis on painting, drawing, and photography. Brett frequently documents moments of radical, exploratory growth through elaborate installations that make intimately personal experiences universally accessible. Exhibitions of his work regularly include participatory public projects installations, using a wide variety of media to model the stories of transformation that occur through social collaboration. Brett's teaching practice and public speaking is an extension of his social collaborations and similarly involve diverse communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught a variety of subjects at all academic levels, and published in academic journals at Columbia and Stanford Universities. He was the 2008 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Cook received a BFA from the University of California at Berkeley and has had many residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Headlands Center for the Arts, California. |
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