Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Stein.

Hi Josh, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born in New Jersey and lived there until moving to Northern California at 17. I went to school at UC Riverside in Southern California and the University of Liverpool before relocating to Napa. Along the way, I have been a graphic designer and creative artist, musician, writer, professor, and adult beverage maker, among other things. I am currently finishing my MFA at School of Visual Arts in New York City. My artwork has been nationally and internationally published numerous times and exhibited in a wide range of locations around the world, including the Popular and Contemporary Culture Museum in Tallinn, Estonia; the CICA Museum in Seoul, Korea; Adas Israel in Washington DC; Burning Man in Blackrock, Nevada; and Gallery 1064 in Seattle, amongst many others. I have had multiple solo shows in California and Washington states and have participated in numerous duo and group shows nationally and internationally. I work in highly textured metallic and fluorescent acrylics in my 2D projects and work with industrial plastics in various ways for 3D. I like to boil it down by saying my formal training in calligraphy, graphic design, and color work; more than three decades as a researcher, teacher, and writer in cultural analysis in the vein of the Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools; and a decade and a half as a commercial artist and designer for multiple winery clients bring together my influences of Pop art, Tattoo flash and lining techniques, and Abstract Surrealism and Expressionism to the extreme edge where graphic design and calligraphy meet the Platonic theory of forms.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I had worked in various professional capacities as an artist and graphic designer for multiple decades before making the decision to dedicate serious time to developing my current practice almost a decade ago now. One of the impetuses was exactly all the projects done for others for money: creative skills are harnessed to someone else’s vision, ultimately, which has a certain satisfaction from completed work but also undermines itself because each successful project is really successful for someone else. Deciding I wanted to do my own work was the easy part: just do it, which is why I average more than 200 pieces a year. However, the hard part is creating time and space for it, paying for it, trying to find ways to make it at least pay for itself. etc. I made the decision very early on to structure my life around making work because that is what truly makes me happy, so along with that meant finding employment which pays well enough but is also remote to allow a freedom of schedule. Between teaching and remote corporate employment, I juggle a lot of things logistically, but I work out of my studio, so my breaks allow me to paint or work with plastics, and then go back to the next thing on my list. The challenge to scheduling life is just that: make lists and lists of lists so that nothing has to be worried about in our own heads. Offshore it to paper and then cross off those puppies as possible. It all adds up to getting stuff done without losing one’s mind.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
By necessity, not choice, I am an American bricoleur, a shaper of whatever comes my way. I make art because it’s fun to fuck with people’s heads, to push back against yet hopefully leave a lesson for a world which mostly ignores my existence. I make artworks in metallic and fluorescent acrylics and industrial plastics because it’s even more fun to have people realize I am playing with them and then want it to continue, and these are the best tools to those ends. What magician doesn’t want a willing, incredulous audience and a stage conducive to transformation? Along the way, I take mostly disregarded industrial materials and elevate them into works which demand attention on their own terms. The goal is the substantiation of imagination: fooling the eye into seeing things it never imagined could exist, and then going beyond to ask for willing participation in a different way of seeing the world around us, externally and internally.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I’m the oddball in my MFA cohort as I enjoy making, not reading about other artists or going to galleries or museums. I grew up without access to any of that, which is why I learned to create with my own hands, words, and mind. I watch a lot of things on youtube in the background: science, math, history, philosophy, etc. As for favorite books, I have many suggestions depending on others’ interests. Ones I have so often they are memorized: Dune, The Crying of Lot 49, Finnegans Wake, The Forever War, Gravity’s Rainbow, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Player of Games.

Pricing:

• 2d: $50 to $5,000
• 3D: $100 to $10,000

Contact Info:

• Website: steincreates.com, thegivingproject.art
• Instagram: @steincreates