We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nate Hester a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nate, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

My idea for a more beautiful America arose from how squalid my college dormitory was. At Rice University, I interned for the incomparable Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in the photography department. We were putting on retrospectives for both Picasso and Rauschenberg; I was also cataloguing the work of Andre Kertesz and Walker Evans. On campus, I had just been the lead student volunteer on a yellow and black, giant balloon installation of the Japanese celebrity artist, Yayoi Kusama. The previous year I had lived in a rural village in France. In short, my eyes were surrounded by and accustomed to exquisite elegance – the gorgeous. So, imagine how discouraged my eyes were when I pulled into the living room of my off-campus housing my senior year – what we called the “rugby house.” The off-white walls were bare – with the exception of peeling paint and a stolen Pabst Blue Ribbon neon light. Pizza boxes and jock straps littered the floor. My roommates lounged around watching hours of bootlegged “Boogie Nights” – you remember back, when you could hack the Cable black box and get HBO for free? I am fond of those years, but they were ugly. And, it is not just college dorms – which, granted, are notoriously gross. I mean who has time for decorating when there is school and work and partying to be had? So, I set about to make my spaces as beautiful as possible. What I found in the marketplace was just as discouraging! For what the average American is willing to spend on art and what they have access to – say, at the rack at Marshall’s or even their local art gallery – most of the shit on offer is soulless, banal, reproductions of abstract horses, On the other end, at the tip-top of international fine art, the work was so obtuse, conceptual and minimal that it was hard to understand much less live with. Thus, Nate Hester: Pretty Sketchy was born. If I couldn’t buy it, could I make my own beauty? Could I fill the walls of my house and office with something to please my eyes and heart? And, then, could I leverage technology to make my soulful silly vision of the world accessible to as wide enough audience as possible? That’s how my idea got off the ground.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

The “Nate Hester: Pretty Sketchy” studio would have preferred to have arisen out of sheer and unimaginable joy, but it really grew out of heartache. I am not sure about you, but my life is a bit of a dumpster fire. I love that Leonard Cohen line: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” My life has both a lot of cracks and a lot of light. Here is an example. My father taught me how to draw. As an architect who believed that you had to really know places and spaces before you made structures for them, he and I would sit on the ground on his job sites with Windsor Newton watercolor kits and sketch. He lived in California. I visited in the summertime. I spent the rest of the year with my mother in North Carolina. I drew as a child and a teen, because the activity made me miss my father less. I did not like divorce then. I like it even less now. My 17-year long-term partnership ended during COVID. I have not seen my 15-year old son since March of 2022. I draw now – and build fanciful, playworlds – because the activity makes me miss my son less. All the care and attention and goofiness that I would have wanted to give to him every day, I now give to my pieces of paper and canvases and animations and sculptures. More broadly, my project is about creating a visual vernacular of inclusivity – where everyone feels welcome – where everything is “at home.” I want the opposite of divorce in my pieces. I want “connection” and “engagement” and “contact.” I want things that should otherwise not belong together to sing in harmony. Now, I have won awards, been included in museum collections, gone on international residencies and executed portraits of the elite, but what I am most proud of is my logo. My son designed it. He loves to draw as well. He coped with the challenges of his young life by making amazing apocalyptic tableaux of cosmic battles between robots and dinosaurs and zombies. He loved for me to narrate his diabolical scenes with bizarre voices. On one occasion after a slew of these images of intergalactic onslaught, his mother asked him to please draw something beautiful. A strawberry unicorn emerged. It became my logo. The magic and hope lives on in him too. If you believe that silly sweetness will prevail in your life in the face of all the hardship, my artwork is for you. “The Nate Hester Studio: Pretty Sketchy” provides unique wall, installation and projected art pieces as well as fabric and ceramic homegoods.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice

This might be a bit of a hot take, but I support NFTs. I support democratizing art – making it accessible to the billions of folks on the planet. I support finding ways to scale small art studios through mechanical reproduction. Like, where is the visual art version of NETFLIX? Or, SPOTIFY? Can you imagine going on a dating site and revealing your personality to a potential love match by tagging your favorite “artwork” like we do with our favorite songs? NFTs could unleash this access to art and returning it to the center of our collective imaginations. I do believe that “non-fungible tokens” need a rebrand. The speculative and uncertain nature of the block-chain, crypto frenzy which brought the NFT launch to a fever pitch – during the pandemic, when people were already leery of one another – left a sour taste in the mouth of the entire art world. To the forces that be: Regroup. Rebrand. Relaunch. The world needs more art. Be smart and loving as well as marginally profitable in getting it to them.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Ugh. I have already been mushy-gushy and intense in this conversation. But, what the hell! I might as well swing for the fences. Is there a particular goal or mission driving my creative journey? Hell, yeh. I want a better world. I want better homes. I want a better America. I want us to actually be a melting pot – a place of unity and cohesion – where diversity is our strength. As a child of white privilege and as a child of the South, I am personally and particularly interested in race relations. As an expectant father of a biracial baby who my nation will identify as “black” (yes, Penelope Rose is expected to arrive on July 24th), I want to heal the wound of slavery and defeat white supremacy. My black-and-white maximalist collages are on purpose; here, I want to harmonize and synchronize “white” and “black.” In my adult life of advocacy, I have been particularly interested in prison reform. I loathe our current system of mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement. I want a world where everyone can be free.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thenatehesterstudio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_is_pretty_sketchy/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-hester-4b0220139/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thenatehesterstudioprettys9461

Image Credits

“Mark the Photographer” [email protected] Durham NC All Rights Reserved (studio shots of Nate Hester)