We were lucky to catch up with Daniel Bruce recently and have shared our conversation below.

Daniel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

First realized during the art world paradigm shift of 2020, Step Mother Nature was created by artist Daniel A Bruce in an effort to foster a new sense of community among artists looking to go beyond traditional institutional structures. Beginning as an online venue, the gallery has continually focused on building engagement and archiving the works of its featured artists with individual and two-person curated exhibitions.

After a brief hiatus, Step Mother Nature has returned as a physical space in the Adirondacks. In this current iteration, Bruce creates a hybrid setting for the viewing and exploration of the gallery’s diverse group of artists through an ever-evolving curated group exhibition. Acting as a kind of continually shifting cabinet of curiosities, the space brings together 40+ international, national, and local artists in an ongoing conversation. Establishing this link between the material world and the global nature of the internet, Step Mother Nature acts as an anchor for an expansive conversation on the future of artistic practice.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Daniel A. Bruce was born in Altona, New York, in 1978, and works predominately in the medium of sculpture. His education began at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and later at Rhode Island School of Design, where he completed his BFA. He then earned his MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2008. Bruce has exhibited work at various galleries, museums, art fairs, and cultural centers in the United States. He was an artist in residence at Sculpture Space Inc. in Utica, New York, and also spent two summer seasons living and working with Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. In 2014, he mounted a solo exhibition, in a landmarked eighteenth-century wharf at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, where he explored the idiosyncrasies of folk beliefs and superstitions. Most recently, he exhibited in Homemade at the Leslie-Lohman Museum Project Space where he explored commonalities between the typically marginalized spheres of folk art and gay culture.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

What’s an NFT?

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Two books that have influenced my thinking and philosophy on art are as follows…

Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde

and

Art Worlds by Howardbecker

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.stepmothernature.com/
• Instagram: @step_mother_nature