Meet Keith Walsh

Today we’d like to introduce you to Keith Walsh.

Hi Keith, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
In first grade, I drew exacting crayon copies of Van Gogh paintings. I’ve always had an interest in architecture, people, social issues, history, language, images, and music–especially the networks or relations between these things. My studies at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were experimental, cross-media, and cross-disciplinary. My portfolio has been diverse while my core discipline has always been drawing. I’ve maintained an art practice, exhibiting, as well as performing and recording my own music for many years. For most of this span of time, I have been an adjunct college-level art instructor. Overall, I’m interested in making visible obscured histories and struggles and ways of thinking and seeing.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I try to keep a relative perspective that the cultural landscape and marketplace is always changing. My artwork operates between art and research– its focus on socialist politics and class struggle may pose challenges for commercial art galleries.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Since research and old-fashioned design development are integral to my art practice, I tend to think about process and time-traveling a lot. There’s a lot of labor to my work that transpires over months. It happens as I assemble and interpret the information, as I connect with the people I make portraits of, and how timelines and networks are visually generated. Field experience, books, notebooks, files, screenshots, scratch-pads, mock-ups and collages inform each new history chart or a rhetorical piece. Life is a collage that is socially organized within the work to bring about a new experience for the beholder. My favorite pieces combine abstract graphics, texts, and figurative elements to communicate a social message that has both historical and contemporary relevance. Constructivism, Dada, OP Art, Conceptual Art, Photo-based Postmodernism, and other systemic approaches visually animate my work.

Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I grew up in Pleasantville, New York, an hour north of Manhattan. I was a quiet 1970s kid, often drawing on a big drafting table my father hand built for me. I especially loved old American car design, as rolling sculpture and social history. At age thirteen I subscribed to the Studebaker Driver’s Club’s newsletter. Around then I imagined my own car company, the Potomac, with designs that look not unlike the current Prius Prime. At fifteen, I freelanced making detailed pen-and-ink renderings of local homes, and I began working with local historians trying to preserve a historic site.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.keithwalsh-art.com
• Instagram:@keith.walsh87
• Other: https://thekeithwalshexperience.bandcamp.com