Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, ceramics, installation
Ben Peterson was born in 1977 in Hawthorne, Nevada, and grew up in a small rural community in the high desert of central Nevada — also the site of the world's largest military ammunition depot, surrounded by hundreds of concrete bunkers. He moved to the Bay Area after high school, spending his first years in San Francisco and Oakland skateboarding and exploring derelict buildings. He received his BFA in Painting from the California College of the Arts in 2004 and his MFA from Stanford University in 2014. He is a 2019 Eureka Fellow of the Fleishhacker Foundation. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Deutsche Bank, the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, and the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in Athens. He was previously based in Houston before returning to Oakland.
Peterson works primarily in ceramic and clay, producing sculptures and installations that deliberately suppress the medium's usual associations — warmth, tactility, handmade imperfection — in favor of angular, geometric forms whose painted surfaces resemble weathered concrete or patinated stone. The works oscillate between identities as architectural models, functional objects, and primitive totems, referencing the legacy of grain silos, Constructivism, and Brutalism while being constructed according to intuition rather than strict precedent. His interest in industrial ruins, abandoned mining structures, and the New Topographics tradition of photographing the built American landscape runs through the work as a persistent undercurrent.
More recent work has brought the ceramic into dialogue with fire, the desert, and the American West — drawing on Wallace Stegner, the Army Corps of Engineers, and Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire as conceptual anchors for sculptures that explore the relationship between the land and its people.
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