Ben Durham

Home is important to Ben Durham but not in the clichéd way that romanticizes growing up or suffuses adolescence with the golden glow of nostalgia. Instead, he melds image and word to create word pictures of lives gone awry. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, he derives his source material from that city’s police blotter.

Durham holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and now lives in Richmond, Virginia. His work has been shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions. He is currently working on a new series of drawings that, like Text Portraits—the series depicted here—deconstruct likeness to amplify hidden meanings.