Meet Jack Arthur Wood | Artist, Curator, Writer and Art Handler

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jack Arthur Wood and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jack Arthur, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Risk taking and unconventional approaches have always been in my decision making. I have pretty intense ADHD too, so a degree of randomization is built into most of my doing. I may not always choose risk, but it is always there for me, lying in wait. An old friend, once famous for being naked, told me to wake up with the question “What haven’t I tried yet?” I always liked that and have tried to remain curious. Risk is a condition of curiosity.

For graduate school I went to Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi where my studio was on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. It was nicknamed “Cat Island,” because people would dump their unwanted pets there. The whole place was sort of lorded over by colonies of feral cats, raccoons and skunks. I wanted to leave for the entire first year during which I lived in a trailer. That’s about when I first started painting. Living there and teaching there changed me forever. Ultimately I think I’m glad I avoided some of the more “blue chip” programs of the east and west coasts. I think the best learning is experiential and happens outside the classroom anyway and that’s something you create for yourself out of circumstance and hunger. Risk governs all life so you might as well accept the river you already swim in.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I am resistant to understanding my own work and try to stay in the uncomfortable, often called the unknown. The unknown is governed by intuition and fleeting sensation, it is mysterious and dreamy, potentially very evil or very good. I remember Michael Krueger being the first person to talk to me about it. He described it like it was a place and I thought, “I want to go there.” It is a middling place for me.

My background is heavily rooted in printmaking. I didn’t start making paintings until the summer of 2015. The procedural methods of printmaking are still informing how I make a painting, but I stopped planning them and that felt really productive. I have found that I can use sensitivity and my tendency to overreact as un self conscious gestures in my work by turning marks into objects that reference real things, sometimes lazily. Cut pieces of painted cloth can be moved so efficiently around the picture plane. Color has become a building material. Texture emerges naturally as I engineer images in so many layers. Each painting I make is a visual essay reorienting my perceptual world. The meaning in my work is concerned with transcendentalism and the breakdowns in binary thinking. I feel most motivated to paint by the confounding experience of being stuck inside a body. The common thread shared by any painting I might make is that I’m almost always trying to convey the recessional nature of all objects of desire. That satisfaction is slippery, and that understanding often moves away from us.

I had an exhibition at Rachel Uffner Gallery in July 2023 which had been a longstanding goal of mine. Over the summer I completed an installation at The Jentel Foundation that I’m really proud of. It was the color immersion experience I’ve been asking from my work for a long time. I’m seeking a space to support the next one. I currently have an exhibition up at My Pet Ram in New York with fellow painter Roberta Gentry that I feel really proud about. It’s up through January 13th. I have a couple works in an upcoming exhibition at 5-50 Gallery as well. I feel immense gratitude for my studio community and everyone who supports my work. I hope 2024 is better and brighter than 2023. I also just got engaged to Lauren Clark and I’m really proud and excited about that.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I really like the NYBG and other places that feel a little bit far flung like The Cloisters or The American Academy of Arts and Letters which is adjoined to The Hispanic Society which has really astounding Velasquez paintings. The Cloisters has those Unicorn Tapestries you see reproduced a lot. The real thing is so alive. I wasn’t ready for that.

I also really like visiting uptown galleries like Meredith Rosen, Van Doren Waxter, Kristin Lorello, Ceysson & Bénétière and Turn Gallery. Then you can go eat somewhere old and cute like JG Melon. I did that the other day.

I have little rounds I like to make that are specific to neighborhoods but encourage people to make their own. I really like to go gallery hopping on the Lower East Side.

The Queens Museum remains a favorite of mine, I will always go to visit the Panorama. The museum happens to be really close to Citi Field so you could catch a Mets game after. Empanada Cafe is close by and offers the best Empanadas I’ve ever had in my life.

New York has a lot of special screening events. Moma and Metrograph screen really cool movies. I recently was taken to see John Carpenter’s The Fog at The Village East and would recommend seeing a movie there. It’s a beautiful theater.

I always tell people to go eat at Spumoni Gardens out in Coney Island. It’s my favorite pizza.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I first met Wells Chandler through instagram in 2015. At the suggestion of another artist, Wells traded me one of his crocheted works for what was one of the first 15 paintings I’d ever made. A little later on in graduate school I chose Wells’ work and queer mechanics as the subject of an Art History research paper. I read “Cruising Utopia,” and a list of other queer books that would deeply inform my own abstraction. Among these was “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” by Samuel R. Delaney. I eventually published that essay ‘Crocheting Utopia’ in a publication called ÆQAI.

Wells’ hyper-inclusive attitude toward pop culture, performance, media, people, art history, genitalia, color and materials helped me create similar potential in my own work, and I’m still thinking about it. Wells showed me how work could be layered with meaning in order of complexity and that a joy forward attitude was often a best first ingredient. I think it’s hard to face a room full of Wells and not smile. I saw through his bois that choices of pleasure, comfort, or ease can function dually as resistance. I have long been aware of histories naming art as a visionary, hallucinatory or spiritual vehicle. Wells was one of the first living artists to make it real for me and that understanding has been deeply contagious to my own innerworkings.

I would also shoutout my fiancee Lauren Clark, a great artist, and my best friend.

Instagram: @jackarthurwood

Image Credits
Artist Portrait: Roland Miller By file name 1-8: Bradley Marshall 1-4 Courtesy My Pet Ram 5-8 Courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery