Location: Sebastopol, CA
Medium: Conceptual art, social practice, books, prints
Website: benkinmont.com
Ben Kinmont was born in 1963 in Burlington, Vermont, and has lived and worked in Sebastopol, California for many years. He is an artist, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller — three roles that are, in his practice, inseparable. As proprietor of Antinomian Press and a specialist dealer in rare books on food and gastronomy, his commercial life is also one of his most sustained artworks: a project titled Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family, begun in 1998 and ongoing.
He has taught in the Social Practices Program at the California College of the Arts, and has organized workshops with students at the École des Beaux-Arts in France, Cranbrook Academy, and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited at Documenta 11, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, ICA London, CNEAI Chatou, the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, and Air de Paris, among many other institutions. His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA.
Since 1988, Kinmont’s practice has been entirely project-based, concerned with what happens when an art practice is displaced into non-art space — into kitchens, bookshops, homes, streets, and conversations. His projects involve interpersonal exchange as their primary medium: waffle breakfasts hosted over months, private dinners built from recipes written by artists, archives of home conversations whose contents are never disclosed. Each project generates a meticulous archive of letters, photographs, documents, and ephemera, which becomes the physical form the work takes in institutional contexts.
Running through everything is a preoccupation with value — economic, relational, archival — and with the structures that determine what counts as art, labor, or exchange. His antiquarian book business is not a day job that funds his art but a deliberate extension of it, testing the boundary between artistic production and livelihood over decades.
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