Q&A with Heather Bennett 

I’m currently teaching Digital Studio, which is part of the foundations curriculum. I get to teach alongside a designer, so we get to cross-pollinate. I am also teaching Photographing Fiction, which is an art practice course where we’re talking about photography in an expanded sense. It’s not just what you catch with the camera, but what you create for the camera.  

This semester, I’m also teaching Capstone with the BFA seniors in studio art, helping them with their exhibition, presentation, and final paper. Next spring, I’m teaching Art + Feminism — for I think the sixth time — which addresses the political ramifications of certain art practices. It has a more theoretical, critical bent, which I really like.

I love sitting down with graduate students and having conversations in their studios, finding out what their practice is about, what their inspirations are, and then helping them expand their thinking and simultaneously specify it. I then help the students realize the work and their aspirations for it.  

With soft skills, it’s so much about being confident with your own practice. Experimentation is key. One of the most important things I learned in school was to not be afraid to go for it, that I don’t have to do something perfectly the first time. You have to be prepared to make something stupid — that’s how you get somewhere. It takes confidence to get to that place.  

With hard skills, I have so many weird skills because I worked in the movies in New York painting sets. Sometimes I’ll share with students how to use a resin or arcane materials or how to carve something with a sawzall, and they’re like, “Why? Why do you know that?” I know all these materials, recipes, and ways of working with plastic media. What was cool about that movie scenic job was how much I got to paint, learn raw skills, and improvise. I picked up a lot of knowledge, much of it probably irrelevant.  

I really hope that they think about things they knew before, but in new and different ways, expanding possibilities. When you look at something from a different angle, the possibilities of what you can make shift and advance. What I really want students to get to is a way to do this — to expand their thinking — for themselves.  

My practice is evolving. It’s always multimedia. Lately I’ve been working with sound and text more and more.  

I started this body of work called “Remix,” using photographic work that I did in the past. A couple decades ago, I made work where I used myself in the images to interrogate images of women in contemporary media and culture, thinking about assumptions or tropes. Several feminist artists, particularly in the ’70s, put themselves in their work to recontextualize and reconsider the woman as the presumptive object, and becoming subject/author in that same move.

So many years later, looking back at that work… the impetus for what I was doing is still there, but it’s changed as I’ve changed. I think differently about my own gaze, especially on myself. Even though it seems very self-centered because it’s my gaze on myself, it brackets out to the evolution of a female body, a female gaze. How does that change as your ideas change, your body changes, your experiences change?  

I’ve been taking those old photographs and projecting on top of them, creating new works involving sound and text I’ve written. That’s why they’re remixed, they’re an amalgam of all these different processes to look at these pieces through a different lens and expand them.  

The Art + Feminism course has really changed and reinvigorated my thinking, because I see how powerful those artistic practices are. Feminism is still evolving. That’s one of the main things I tell my students: it is still evolving. We don’t have to throw it all out because of the past. We can change it, we are changing it. Rather than let somebody say that it’s irrelevant or obsolete, we can remake it.  

A lot of times, we talk about how art can make you think about changing the world, without actually changing the world. But I really think it does change things, politically, socially, especially when there’s a critical mass of work as there was as certain times in the past using the power of the visual. There’s a distinction between activism and artistic practice, but there’s also an overlap. It’s a powerful way to talk about how certain voices are heard and others haven’t been historically.  

I’m open to different reactions. I’ve seen over the years how much someone’s personal experience changes the way they think about your work. I want the work to be specific, yet also have the capacity to become a touchstone through a visual cue or title.  

In the last 10 years, I always followed a concept-first, realization-second process. But more recently, I did a body of work that was totally the opposite. I didn’t even recognize I was making new work, I thought, “oh, this is just some weird thing I’m doing.” I felt the need to get a new body of work going, and then realized I was in the middle of it. It was interesting to realize that even really deep into your practice, things can change, lines can get blurry, your position can shift. It was surprising in a great way.  

You know, we’re all in a really tough position. I had class the day after the 2024 election, and I didn’t know what I was going to say. I have a healthy sense of cynicism and darkness, but not at the expense of idealism. I question the relevance of my own practice all the time, and I think a lot about what students are working on. It came down to talking with them about how important it is to keep speaking. That’s what we do as artists. That’s what we do very well.