We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bendy Knees Design Company a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Bendy Knees, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
This is one of those questions that we’re constantly asking each other through the evolution of our craft and business, so we figured what the heck – let’s keep pokin’ at it!
Being a women-queer owned business in the south has uniquely influenced our paths and efforts in ways that we’re still processing on the daily and I think it would be silly to assume that this doesn’t effect our profitability based on our location. It’s a weird place to sit on the line of sometimes celebrated, sometimes hated, and the division is pretty equal in our little red state. It was always super important for us to advocate for visibility and foster community connections through public art and with that, we’ve been very grateful to have been given multiple opportunities to work with the queer community in Birmingham. By embracing our identity, we’ve totally enriched our artistic practice and given a bigger purpose to our mission, but we would be fibbin’ if we said it hasn’t affected our profitability.
We’ve also witnessed an extreme lack of collective accountability in the south. Too often artists don’t fully realize that we, as a whole, have the power to set the industry standard. So, when fellow creatives accept lower pay or pass the job off without educating their clients about the true value of custom, hand-painted work, it drives the baseline down for us all. It’s super frustrating to see peers say yes to rates that aren’t sustainable, rather than holding the line and helping clients understand what goes into this craft. After all, this isn’t all about the pretty walls—we’re building culture, place-making, and telling a community’s stories in a medium that deserves respect and fair compensation.
Bendy Knees, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
HELLLOOO! We’re Jordan and Levi, of Bendy Knees Design Company! We’re a sober, queer, women owned mural and installation team out of Birmingham, Alabama. Our work typically portrays the power of color and movement to energetically uplift and shift the environment of a space through abstract shapes and design. We’re super passionate public art advocates and strive to empower, educate, and encourage other creatives, especially women/non-binary/trans/gnc folks, to pursue creative related careers. We strongly believe in the transformative and healing power of shared creative community experiences and we’re so proud to say that this has become our full time gig for 6 years now!
Since forming the company in 2019, we’ve painted murals for a wide variety of clients. From local restaurants / bars & retail spaces across the city of Birmingham to large companies across the southeast, such as Apple, Fetch, Insight Global, Dani Dazey, and the It Gets Better Project! We have also fabricated large scale installations for the Birmingham Museum of Art and Sidewalk Film Festival. Most recently, we’ve joined the team at Sunny Dayz Mural Festival, out of Oklahoma City as the installation leads for this year’s festival.
In between the large scale art and balancing the realities of this world, we gotta’ reel it in a little with some meditative and debriefing studio work. Through this we also create small scale work for all things home, hangy and happy and drop limited edition pieces at local markets. Fingers crossed our website store will be up and running by the time you’re reading this, for exclusive drops online! Keep up with upcoming events/drops by following us on socials @bendykneesdesign.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
Jordan – Well doesn’t this world just prove to be small as HECK sometimes? Here’s a short story for ya. Even though we’re from complete opposite sides of the country, we ended up with the SAME best friend in our high school days here in Alabama. Levi moved to Birmingham, from Ruidoso, New Mexico, when she was fifteen and in true new, cool kid on the block fashion, stole my best friend!! So naturally, in my fifteen year old mind, losing my best friend meant I hated my replacement and we went about our lives for the next ten years. (Ouch, I know!) Flash forward to 2016, I was working in a late night dive bar in town and she walked in, we exchanged snap chats over a shot of tequila and the rest is history!
Levi – You’re so funny. I’ll take it from here.
At the time, I was working at Trader Joes as a sign painter, which led me to doing multiple chalkboards at local restaurants and bars around town. Being a sign painter was so much math and planning and the bigger the jobs got, the more equipment I had to carry around, so I pulled Jordy along here and there. After a few years, one thing led to another and then, she’s helpin’ me with taxes, chalkboard math, AND answering emails?! I always knew that I was going to do everything I could to figure out how to become a full time creative, Jordy just helped make it a reality. Once we started this whole thing, I think we both knew we had stumbled into something really beautiful. And then of course, when we decided to go big / large scale, we officially filed for a business license as Bendy Knees Design Company! That’s when we should say the rest is history.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
The thing we hear most often from non-creatives is, “Ohhhh, no, I’m not creative, I can’t even draw a stick figure! I can’t even draw a straight line! There’s no way I could do what you’re doing.” And that’s where we’re all wrong in this mindset about anything we perceive we ‘can’t’ do. Just like any profession or industry or athlete, etc., daily practice goes into everything we do in this line of work. Our social systems are structured to exhaust us and make the mundane comfortable, sometimes even desirable. But! When you choose to refuse that reality and to practice something that fulfills your soul, especially something that requires play, something fascinating happens from within. It’s truly all about habits, but specifically for us, a habit that requires creative free play. If you think about it long ’n hard, there’s a turning point in most of our childhoods that turns our reckless creative play into pieces meant for judgement if not by ourselves, our teachers and peers. This moment often causes the downward vicious cycle that tells us, “Noooo way you can do that again! Did you see how talented others are? You don’t have that.”
Ultimately, what we have learned from being full time creatives is that there is something so magical about a child’s mind and their ability to play. Even though the majority to us have practiced our lives outside of this mindset, we all still have it. When we can figure out how to access this play and stay there for a little while, we give our entire system a moment of rest and healing. And that’s where the magic is made!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bendykneesdesign.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bendykneesdesign
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bendykneesdesign
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bendy-knees-design-company/
Image Credits
headshot – Tez Davenport @thedavenportdesign