Christopher W. Benson
American, born 1960
(not assigned)Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, North American
BiographyI was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960 and grew up in nearby Newport. From 1975 to '79 I attended the Woodstock Country School in South Woodstock, Vermont. WCS was an alternative, liberal arts boarding school, founded in the 1940s by former students and teachers from the Black Mountain School. It offered a strong painting course under the direction of Peter Devine, a realist painter with Modernist sensibilities. WCS closed in 1981.In 1979 I enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. At the time, RISD's painting program began to move towards more conceptual art forms. Feeling increasingly out of place as a relatively traditional realist, I withdrew from the school at the end of my junior year.
In the fall of 1982 I moved to New York city where I apprenticed in a cabinetmaking shop while painting at night and on weekends in my Brooklyn studio and studying paintings independently in the city's galleries and museums.
In 1988 I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where I spent two years painting landscapes and architectural scenes from the Southwest and California. An exhibition of my western landscapes was held at Arlene LewAllen's Gallery in Santa Fe in 1992. One of my paintings of a street scene in Arizona was also included that year in a juried exhibition at the American Academy in New York.
In 1993, I moved with my fiancé, Cybele Leverett, to Berkeley, California. We were married there in 1994 and had our first son, William, in 1997. While living in the Bay Area, I exhibited in galleries in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.
Between 1991 and '97, while continuing to show architectural and landscape paintings in the galleries, I also worked as a commissioned portrait painter, completing over thirty individual and group portraits for private clients and institutions, including two official portraits for Stanford University — of John Ely, Dean of the School of Law, and a posthumous portrait of Nicholas Hoff, Dean of the School of Aeronautics and Aviation. Many years later, in 2015, I also painted a portrait of Law School Dean David Levi for Duke University.
In 2000, Cybele and I returned to Rhode Island, where we each re-enrolled at college — she to get a master's degree in teaching at Brown University, and I to complete my previously abandoned painting BFA at RISD. Our second son, Fisher, was born in Providence in 2001. While living in Rhode Island, I exhibited for four years at the Virginia Lynch Gallery in Tiverton and continued to show in galleries in Santa Fe and San Francisco.
In 2002 I received my first Pollock-Krasner Fellowship grant. Cybele and I each graduated from our respective degree programs in 2004 and 2005 and in 2006 we relocated the family to New Mexico.
On returning to New Mexico, I exhibited initially with the Gerald Peters Gallery, then again at the LewAllen Galleries. Since 2019 I have shown at EVOKE Contemporary. I also had solo exhibitions at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, in 2014, and at the Washburn Gallery in New York in 2023.
My paintings reside in private and museum collections throughout the United States and abroad. I received a second Pollock-Krasner grant in 2016 and since then have had three major exhibitions in museums in Rhode Island, North Dakota and Texas. I am also a designer and publisher of books on art, a digital photographic editions printer, a published essayist and reviewer, and an accomplished finish carpenter, builder and renovator. My wife of thirty years, Dr. Cybele Leverett, is an an educator. We live together in Santa Fe and our two sons, now adults, live nearby.
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
- male
