Global Chaos, Healing Art:
The Works of Sam Sebren
by Jay Blotcher

When concerned about the general state of affairs in Bush’s America, some people pen letters to the editor of their local newspaper. Others hoist a protest sign and take to the streets. Sam Sebren, an Athens, New York-based artist, makes his sentiments known by stretching another canvas. For the better part of three decades, Sebren, 46, has transformed critical thought about culture, politics and the environment into provocative paintings, sculptures and art installations exhibited in the Hudson Valley, New York City and nationally.

Two new pieces will be part of a Bard College art show in February, in conjunction with a conference on global warming called “Focus the Nation.” Sebren’s contributions to the show contain his signature style: raw brushstrokes in acrylic paint, chaotic collage and titles calculated to jar. But why do these works that lampoon America’s rampant consumerism—“Breeding Zombie Consumers” and “Jesus Died for our Malls”—appear in a show about fluorocarbons and melting Arctic glaciers? Sebren explained the environmental harm posed by the many boatloads of “goods from China and the amount of fuel it takes to transport them all over the world,” while also citing the mountains of toxic plastic containers left in landfills after Christmas Day. His response confirms that even behind Sebren’s most provocative work, there lies a well-considered and well-informed rationale.

A native son of Norfolk, Virginia, Sebren says his character—and ultimately his artwork—was formed by the bigotry that anchors his home state. Growing up gay, he learned firsthand the religious fury that could crush anyone who diverged from preordained standards. He stuck around long enough to earn a BFA from Old Dominion University before heading for New York City’s Lower East Side in 1985. Among the amenities of his Ridge Street apartment: junkies passed out in the hallway and the occasional stray bullet whizzing through an open window. “Some of us have certain moments in their lives when they are politicized,” Sebren said. “Living in the Lower East Side at that time in the 1980s was a moment when I began to understand divisions in society, not to mention the horrific days of AIDS and Ronald Reagan.” 

Sebren was not another middle-class artist kid glomming onto lower-class pain for kicks and inspiration; at one point he was homeless (a landlord stole his entire nest egg) and living for several weeks in Tompkins Square Park. Even in indigence, the artist was wildly resourceful: the Park became his open-air studio. While camping out on a bench, he continued painting, creating miniatures or conjuring sidewalk murals for spare change. He attended numerous gallery openings in the neighborhood not only to further his career, but to ensure at least one meal a day, even if it was only wine, cheese and crackers.

His subject matter, once focused on psychological states of mind, began reflecting newfound sensibilities. Portraits of neighborhood denizens would omit the bleak surroundings; instead, Sebren would place them into brightly colored fantasy situations: “surreal landscapes and trippy atmospheres, or riding bikes in the sky.” In hindsight, Sebren realizes his artistic reconfigurations were necessary coping skills. “[I was] trying to create a brighter world than what I was experiencing,” he said.

Artist Martin Wong, a social realist rising on the East Village scene, invited Sebren to share his apartment where the two painted days and late nights, reserving the evenings for the electric social scene. Wong found his roommate a position as gallery assistant at Semaphore Gallery, one of the first SoHo galleries to open a branch in the East Village, now an internationally recognized locus for a growing, urgent, and often nihilistic fin-de-siecle movement.

Sebren learned from his mentor, absorbing Wong’s preference for dark colors and equally dark themes. He began to imbue his artistic work with the vision of a sociologist, capturing the lively contradictions of East Village life in a series of stark, realistic portraits; in one particular work, a friend is holding an immense pot of spaghetti in the trash-filled street, while in the background street people huddle on the corners. Sebren was unknowingly echoing the mission of Jacob Riis, whose photographic documentation of squalid East Village scenes a century ago would spearhead widespread reformation. Soon, he was getting solo shows in some of the leading East Village galleries: B-Side, La MaMa and Pene DuBois, garnering praise from fellow artists and write-ups in arts weeklies, if not fortune and fame.

After 15 years in Manhattan, Sebren moved north to Greene County, where he has spent the past eight years. Predictably, the change of scenery effected a change in his subject matter. “Now I’m in more open spaces so it is opening up my work a little bit,” he said, acknowledging a transition from an earlier style of composition Sebren termed “claustrophobic chaos.” But his Manhattan work habits are hard to shake. “There is still a level of obsessiveness in the way I work.”  For the perennial social activist, his rural home affords numerous inspirations for new art pieces. “I am not saying anything is really rosier, because I’m watching the destruction of this place: Wal-Mart and pollution and outdoor advertising.” Whether East Village poverty or Mid-Hudson Valley poverty, the depiction of man at odds with his environment remains a major theme in Sebren’s work.

This theme was explored with a renewed intensity this past summer when Sebren was one of several artists asked by the Kingston Sculpture Biennial to contribute an installation for an unlikely gallery space: the recently vacated Ulster County Jail in Kingston. Sebren was given a space that already possessed an aura of dread: the Respiration Isolation Room was created originally for quarantining inmates with tuberculosis.

His kinetic mind swimming with the possibilities, Sebren created a sound, light and visual display he called “CHAOS THEORY,” that simultaneously challenged the trappings of the correctional system and created empathy for prisoners. Among the pieces in his installation: an audiotape statement by a friend of Sebren who had been at Riker’s Island (a notorious New York City jail), paintings, drawings, news clips and videos. Sebren festooned the walls with toy guns, handcuffs, cop cars and police figures to dramatize how “we have mass-merchandised issues of law and order.” The artist’s ultimate goal?  To create “a maddening atmosphere” of disparate items that would eventually come together for the visitor “in a giant puzzle,” he said.

During the show, Sebren experienced one of those rare moments that energizes an artist. One day, while the exhibition was closed, he was fixing some elements in his multimedia installation when a group of fifteen men walked in. The group’s chaperone explained that they were former inmates who wanted to see the show, “an innovative type of rehabilitation therapy,” Sebren thought.  “It was not just a bunch of people standing around a gallery having wine and talking real estate.”

Some were reluctant to venture further in. One man pointed to a former cell now housing art and said evenly, “I lived in there for a year.” After visiting the CHAOS THEORY installation, they walked over and one by one silently shook Sebren’s  hand. For the artist, this was vindication in its purest form. “They got that the art was there not to be belittling or derogatory to their experience, but sympathetic.”

Another recent gratification occurred at The College of St. Rose in Albany, where Sebren was invited to contribute to a theologian conference about Jesus entitled “Who Do You Say That I Am?” His huge canvas conflated the notion of deity worship and rock star worship; “Jesus/Stooges” alluded to performer Iggy Pop, who used to provide a punk version of stigmata by cutting his flesh during shows. “Jesus/Stooges” eventually attracted the greatest attention at the conference and Sebren was even thanked by the chairman.

Asked to cite his art-world heroes, Sebren cites the Dadaists, known for their unflinching political stances wedded to unsettling imagery that presaged the horror of the Great War. Once reviled as hucksters and provocateurs, they are now considered avatars of a new era of art. While some have considered his art too subversive or strident, like Duchamp and Ernst, Sebren offers no apologies. “I am not here to do something easy; that’s not my job.”  He points out that the widespread influence of corporate funding in today’s art world is responsible for the taming and censoring of work that dares to criticize the Bush administration, the war and multinational companies.

Given today’s increasingly conservative climate, Sebren said, “To be an artist is to be a political act in itself.” While Sebren acknowledges that his choice of subject matter is not typical fare for a spot above the living room couch, he does so without apology. 

“Of course I’d like to sell some things,” but he stresses the importance of art to enlighten and change minds, that “the main point is to get people uplifted or to be rethinking what we are doing here.”

Sebren was honored last autumn at his Norfolk, Virginia high school with a 39-piece show of his selected photography from the past two decades. Returning to his home turf, Sebren made sure his soapbox traveled with him. After inaugurating the new gallery space, Sebren spoke to parents, teachers and school administrators at a reception. There, he took a potshot at his alma mater’s obsession with machismo and sports, addressing the importance of emphasizing arts as an equal facet of education. 

The message—delivered diplomatically but clearly, Sebren said—was “instead of another football field, underwrite a ballet class.”              .

Bard College’s “Focus the Nation” conference on global warming will feature an art exhibition “Regarding Global Warming and Climate Change”, 2/1 through 2/7, 10 AM-5 PM daily. Curated by Sigrid Sandstrom at Bard College’s Fisher Studio Arts Building.   Opening reception: Friday, February 1, 6:30 - 7:30 PM.  For details, visit inside.bard.edu/berd/energy_programs.shtml

Jay Blotcher is an Ulster County-based writer who covers the arts.  In December, he co-curated an exhibition of AIDS activist art from the 1980s at the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center in Kingston.