Brett Cook

Brett Cook integrates his diverse training in art, education, social sciences, and contemplative traditions to create a spectrum of objects and experiences that transcend classification in any singular discipline. He engages in both individual and collaborative processes of expression to promote community and celebrate the interconnectedness of all things. Brett’s solo practice includes fabricating engaging art works that honor the best of humanity in all of us. Other times, Brett works with people – sometimes large groups of people - and he may not make any objects. Through mindful interpersonal dialogue, the conceptual co-development of a protocol, or a contemplative curriculum, Brett facilitates collective creativity and builds environments where other people will make things – and “things” include objects, ideas, and new ways of being. Brett’s work also falls into countless ratios between the extremes of “solitary” artist and community catalyst, as both one signature and countless hands working to relieve suffering in the world.
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. He 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.
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 North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Cook received a BFA from 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.

Website Highlights

Face Up: Telling Stories
of Community Life
Durham, North Carolina and
The Center for Documentary
Studies at Duke University
2006 - 2008

Amherst College
Community Portraits
with Wendy Ewald and
Amherst University
2006 - 2008

Building Community
Making History
Collaborative Project/Exhibition
The National Portrait Gallery and
Duke Ellington School of the Arts
May 2007

Identity of Interbeing
Collaborative Project/Exhibition
Packer Collegiate Academy
April 2006

Meditations Solo Exhibition
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
at Wesleyan University’s
Center for the Arts
April 2005

Brett Cook Links
Face Up Documentary Video
PPOW Gallery