Brendt Berger
Brendt Berger (L) and wife Maria (2nd from left) with friends Jane and Barry at his retrospective show Beavers of the Huerfano
Brendt Berger is a painter, muralist, and educator whose career spans over six decades and bridges Hawai’i, New York, and Colorado. He studied at Sacramento City College and earned his BFA from the University of Hawai’i after serving in the USAF Reserves. Berger has taught at the Honolulu Academy of Art, Richmond Art Center, School of Visual Arts (NYC), and the University of Juarez in Mexico. His murals can be found in iconic public and commercial spaces, from Honolulu’s Bishop Museum and Hawaii Convention Center to Tower Records in Hawaii. He has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Honolulu Academy of Art, and Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Art Center. Berger’s works reside in major collections such as the Boston Museum, Honolulu Academy of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
The following are excerpts from Brendt Berger’s interview.
Hugh Leeman: Brendt, an ethos of generosity and friendship has been so central to your life and art. Who fostered those attributes and your artistic interests during your childhood?
Brendt Berger: It's a mix, but I'd have to say being Hawaiian to start. Those are core attributes of being Hawaiian and they're very important to me, as is community— it’s everything.
HL: In 1959, you studied with Wayne Thiebaud and Greg Condos at Sacramento City College. Afterward, you transferred to the University of Hawaii to pursue your Hawaiian ancestry. How did that change the direction of your life, your worldview, and how you saw art?
BB: Actually, I don't know that it did. I went to Hawaii to get out of the military. That’s why I went. I caught a hop on a plane out of Travis Air Force Base and landed in Hawaii, took the bus from the airport to Fort DeRussy, which was the R&R spot for the Pacific on Waikiki Beach. That's when I first got to Hawaii. So, it was the idea of getting out of the military.
"Wave action" 2003 Acrylic on canvas 12'x 8'
HL: I want to focus a bit more on that. It's a fascinating statement to be so frank and honest about it, especially at such an interesting time. Tell me more about this idea of getting out of the military. How did going to Hawaii accomplish that? What was the internal dialogue like that said, "I don't believe in this. I can't be a part of the military"? How did that conversation go internally?
BB: To go back a little bit, my mother called a military recruiter because she was worried that I'd never leave the nest. So, one day out of high school, I came home, and there was a military guy on my porch. That day I signed up to be in the military. I was 17 and couldn't leave until I was 18. What's interesting here is that I joined the reserve program instead of the regular one. I went to meetings and participated in the military.
When I got back to California, I started going to junior college. The military actually put me in junior college in a way—I wasn't going to go to school, but they put me in a barracks full of college grads. To go from that barracks to the one next door, which was all enlisted guys, some of whom didn't even graduate from high school, was a shock. The language they spoke was so different that I decided right there I was going to go back to school.
When I got back to California, I went to the weekend meetings and summer camps for about three years. Then I started screwing up, in the sense of going from Sacramento City College to Travis Air Force Base to Hamilton Field in Marin County. I started going on off-weekends so I didn't have to participate as much. I heard through the grapevine that they were going to make an example of me and send me away for 90 days. In response to that, I knew that if I went somewhere they didn't have this program, I would get out. So, I went to Hawaii.
When I was in Hawaii, I wrote to the base commander and told him I was going to go to the university. He said, "Good luck. I'm taking you off regular service and putting you on standby. Should you be called up in a national emergency, you would be sent to a unit." So that's why I did that.
"lava" 1996 Acrylic on canvas "6 x 8'
HL: It's a very interesting thread to pull on. You said you were "messing up," and then later, that "they wanted to make an example" of you. What were you doing that caused the military to want to make an example of you?
BB: I was going on off-weekends. I don't quite remember now, but I would go on a weekend I wasn't supposed to go and just show up and sign in. That worked fine for a while, but eventually, they caught on.
HL: You went to the University of Hawaii, and then in 1965, you taught a printmaking workshop in Juárez, Mexico. This was amidst the so-called "Mexican economic miracle." What was your experience teaching printmaking and experiencing Mexico at a time of so much change?
BB: I went down there as a sort of beatnik sojourn to see who I was. And every place in Mexico, you stumble into a reality that mirrors your life. I picked up a hitchhiker, and next thing I know, I'm in Durango. And next thing you know, I'm at the university there and am good friends with the printmaker. They only had one letterpress, and they were doing block printing only. I had a proofing press with me and offered to set it up in the department, and that's how it came about.
HL: In the late 1960s, back here in the United States, there was this incredible cultural climate. At this time, you participated in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, you met Martin Luther King Jr., and you were part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley University. Looking back on all of that now, what stands out from your personal experiences during those tumultuous times?
BB: I was working at the University of California in the genetics department, and the Free Speech Movement started in Sproul Plaza, which is where I would go for lunch. I was there in the very beginning. Before that, I was living with a guy I met at a philosophers' conference in Hawaii in Berkeley. He was a PhD candidate in the philosophy department and said a lot of things. He mentioned his sister married an artist, Dick van Buren. I eventually hooked up with him, but he was distraught because his sister had gone off on the Mississippi Freedom Rides for voter registration. I was living on Stanton Street in San Francisco and would go over to the Haight, which was the nearest neighborhood. That changed radically between 1965 and 1966.
After returning from Mexico, I drove across the country and set up a studio in New York. The first person I looked up was Dick van Buren and his wife, Judy. They were having difficulties and were splitting up. I was instrumental in bringing Richard's new wife into the scene, who was a dancer in the Alwin Nicholais company, who was located in the henry street settlement. At the time, she couldn't understand what modern dance was about. She thought it was about her, but Nikolai integrated the dancer with the props and lighting. He presented a whole show of everything interacting. Basically, she wanted to be acknowledged as a premier dancer. Anyway, I'm getting off track here.
"Hawaiian stretch" diptych 1983 Alkyd on canvas 12'x 8'
HL: I like where you're going with this. I want to hear more about your time in New York City because, as I understand it, a lot of industry was leaving the city, which left empty warehouses and lower rents that artists began to take over. Is that right?
BB: Oh, yeah. When I first got there, I met some artists in Mexico in Ajijic, and they said if I would bring back their artwork, I could stay at their place on Spring Street and Lafayette. So I did that, and my first place was above a cigar store in the pie-shaped building. It had a wood-burning stove, so all winter, I had to drag skids up four flights of stairs, break them up, and burn them. That was my only heat, and there was no shower.
Then, Richard van Buren was moving, and it was a pre-Civil War building above Tony's Bar. He wanted $300, and I said I wanted it. I moved him across the street and took his place for $50 a month. There was a cigarette machine downstairs in the bar, and I'd go down to get cigarettes. My electricity would often go out because Tony would pull my fuse when his lights blew fuses. That's how I became friends with Tony, and there were a lot of women there who looked out for him. I ran into my old friend Dennis Oppenheim at the bar one night when I went in to get cigarettes.
To go back to Hawaii for a second, one important person was Ed Stasack, the printmaker painter from Illinois. The other person I'll mention is Jean Charlot. He was a Mexican muralist with a Mexican mother and a French father. He was teaching at the University of Hawaii when I was there. In 1995, I received a commission to do a mural at the convention center in Honolulu. They had rescued one of Charlot's frescos and reinstalled it at the convention center, and it was so immediate. It put the graduate students and teachers from the university to shame; it looked great.
"Tower Records" 1997 Acrylic on board 40" X 30"
HL: We've got your time in Hawaii and New York. I want to switch gears and hear about Maine. You've had this beautiful theme in your life of artist communities. Can you tell the story of founding your first artist community in Eastport, Maine?
BB: Yes, but I want to go back. It began for me in high school. I started an auto club in a college prep high school. That auto club is my only credit in my graduation yearbook. In 1966-67, I was in San Francisco for the hippie thing. I also befriended Dean Fleming. When I arrived in New York, one of the first people I met was Dean Fleming. He was with the girl upstairs, Patty Krebs, who I guess is retired now, but she taught painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. At the time, she was living on West Broadway and Broome Street. I met Dean, and he had gone to Colorado as part of a group of artists from New York. While he was there, he heard about Drop City. Drop City was the first artist commune of the '60s, and it took place in Trinidad. Dean was a participant, painting the domes.
He met a guy named Rick Klein who put up the money if he was interested in doing something similar. He moved to Colorado and purchased 30-60 acres in the forest, and that commune is still going on today. I visited there and became good friends with Steve and Pat Reines, who were Diggers from San Francisco and the Mime Troupe. They and many others from the Bay Area and all over the U.S. came out to this area and started six communes in the Gardner area of Colorado.
Then, in 1969, I bought a place in Maine for $700. The ad said "house on the Maine coast." I went up and bought the house. When I got back to New York, I got an eviction notice, my building had sold, and my wife was pregnant. So we went up to Maine and started an artist community by purchasing a fish factory, which became the community. Artists like Joe White came and were our first artist residents at the fish factory. That was the start of it. There were a lot of people like me who came together with this interest to start the artist community in Eastport.
libre, one cube black n yellow and one red.
1983, Acylic on canvas, Dimensions: 10ft x 5ft
Painted in Booklyn, NY after a summer at libre.
HL: How did that go from being a vibrant community where you and your wife were raising your child to coming to an end?
BB: I used to listen to New York City radio every night, and I missed New York. Also, I had a whole lot of paintings I took to New York, and I set up a gallery. I met an artist named Al Hansen, whose brother Kenny was setting up the gallery. Al Hansen was the artist, and Kenny was the gallery owner. I did the first show in the gallery with my friends Arnold Wexler, Stuart Hitch, Gerald Jackson, and two others.
When I got back to New York, I immediately plugged into the Organization of Independent Artists (OIA). Arnold had discovered that you could put art in federal buildings. We built an organization around art shows in federal buildings. It culminated for me personally with a show in Washington, D.C. at the Department of Education and the Commerce Building. I brought 50 artists down from New York and installed these shows. Then, Jay Solomon was the director of the GSA, in charge of all the federal buildings all over the world. He said he wanted me to help start an art bank to support living artists, either through sales to the federal government or by renting shows. To that end, I met two women who were decorators whose job was to decorate incoming congressmen. I thought, "Great, these people are already in place." In retrospect with Trump, I'm glad that didn't happen, but that was the idea at the time. We had a lot of support for it, but it was not enough.
Brendt and his wife Maria (R) and daughter Sarah (L) at his retrospective
HL: You and Maria have had a wonderful collaborative journey in the arts and founded the Museum of Friends together. How did you two meet, what was the inspiration behind starting the museum, and what's the high aspiration for it?
BB: First off, I could not have done this without my wife Maria. I was ready to walk away several times and she made things work. I met Maria when she was doing a mural in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with the artist Richard Mock. They were working with children on the mural, and I was living in Red Hook and was friends with Richard, so I stopped. That's when I met Maria. Later, Maria and I and a lot of others were in the first art show in Red Hook called the Hook Gallery on Commerce Street.
When I went to Hawaii in the '90s because my son got accepted into the school for Hawaiians, which meant I had to move there, I came back to Brooklyn and Al Loving was living in my house. He was moving, so I took the house and turned it into a rooming house. It was a three-story tenement apartment, and there was a three-story building in the back. Maria and I started seeing each other and eventually got married in 2005. That forced the sale of the building I had purchased in Red Hook for $10,000. With that money, I came out here. Part of the settlement was a house in Gardner that I had built. I didn't really have any place in Brooklyn, so Maria agreed to come out here, and we would start an art museum with our personal artwork.
Mine mainly came from walking into a studio while putting shows together for the OIA. I would admire something, and many artists are always starved for attention. They appreciated my insights and would offer me something. So I had a lot of artwork that I brought to the table. We decided that we would open a museum in Walsenburg, which was between Drop City and Libre, the two meccas of the counterculture. We did that.
I thought, what better place and time to acknowledge the debt of the counterculture? The counterculture is basically against everything that America stands for, meaning capitalism. Most people go for the money, and those people who didn't go for the money, our society doesn't want to acknowledge them. This museum has been a struggle. When we first opened it, we were upstairs, and we had a tenant downstairs who paid rent that covered our minimal operating expenses because we work for nothing. This whole episode has been about working for the people. I'm personally thrilled when someone comes by who really likes the variety of things we offer and likes the stories we're able to tell of the artists who made the artwork.
For example, I met Matt Gonzalez through my daughter, actually. I was in Matt's office, and he offered me an African pillow that was a wood alligator, which I treasure, and it's here at the museum. We reached out to Matt and asked if he had something to exhibit, and he provided a lot of collages and work that he initially started. I put Matt together with a guy I met in Hawaii named Harry Tsuchidana. When Harry heard that I was opening an art museum, he sent me 60 original watercolors. Many of those were in the show with Matt and also with Maria. It was a fabulous show.
"Buzzy birth" 1980 Alkyd on canvas 12'x 8'
HL: I want to dig a little deeper into this idea of friendship. In 1978, you made what would become known as the world's largest painting. It was an unsanctioned artwork, some 800 feet long by 75 feet tall. It was on the side of the highway in New York City to be seen from the World Trade Center. Can you share the story of its creation? How does it connect with the importance you place on telling stories and recording the past?
BB: I had done work at the World Trade Center in Building 6, the customs building, as part of the OIA. It was a stepping stone. When Art on the Beach started to do artwork on the beach, which was basically sand excavated to make the World Trade Center that was put into the river, I was friends with a guy I met through Dennis, Joe Strnad. Joe and I were going to do the mural together, but Joe wanted to do it on the beach, and I wanted to do it on the highway. At the time, I had a girlfriend, and she wanted to be a part of it. We asked Joe to join us on the highway, and Joe didn't want to. So, I did the mural.
We seized the initiative; there was no permission. When we were putting the final touches on it, the police came up, and one guy said, "Of course you have permission to do this mural." I said, "Are you crazy? Do you think I'd do this without permission?" He said, "I know, I had to ask," and he left. The rest is history. Oh, it's not history. There was a press conference on the roof. Someone like Joseph Beuys was coming to New York, and he wanted to dedicate the painting to Joseph Beuys, and we didn't want to. I didn't know Joseph Beuys and didn't want to. So he went about doing his press conference in spite of us. A television crew came down on the highway and said, "Why aren't you guys up at the press conference?" I said, "Well, it's the first I've heard of it."
Museum of Friends, installation vie of the artist’s retrospective
HL: Returning to the Museum of Friends, you've had a retrospective of your art there. Once the artwork was all hung, and you saw these canvases together that pulled decades of your creativity, what were the stories and emotions that ran through your mind?
BB: It's impossible to answer. Each painting is a story, and each painting was one of many in that genre. I have one painting here on cardboard that's six pieces of 5-foot cardboard, two rows of three, that makes a 10 by 15-foot piece. My father was dying, and I wanted to honor him, so I started this painting. He died while I was painting it. That painting has never been seen. It's here for the first time; I'm seeing it since he died in 1981, and it's quite fantastic.
Another painting was the culmination of a birth series. Each painting in that series is 15 feet. They're all 10 feet by 8 feet or 12 feet by 8 feet. I bought a roll of canvas 8 feet wide and had a commission to do a mural for a group of dentists. I used 75 feet of the 100 yards. The 75-foot mural was created on an 8-foot wall, scroll style. I didn't see the painting until I installed it, and it came out great.
Anyway, I have the last painting in that series. No two paintings were supposed to be remotely alike. For the last one, I divided the canvas into light and dark, and I couldn't figure out how I was going to resolve it. Then, my son was born. He was delivered by Puerto Rican national liberation people. That's a story in itself, but they did a wonderful job. He was born right there in our studio, and I realized how to resolve the light and dark with his birth. I put a big footprint on it. And now the footprint is what dominates the light and dark, with a wonderful resolve.
"six poles" 1979 Alkyd on canvas 12'x 8'
HL: Tell me that story of your son, the Puerto Rican national liberation people and the artwork.
BB: That was a hippie thing in Brooklyn and Manhattan. This person came by and said, "I've been told to meet you, and you are part of the counterculture, and I am too." I said, "My wife is pregnant," and midwifery was illegal in New York City in 1979 and 1980. There were only two midwives in all of New York City who were licensed to practice, and they worked out of Roosevelt Hospital. In any event, this woman who was visiting said there was a people's clinic in the South Bronx, and she thought there was a midwife. So I checked it out and met Dr. John Lichtenstein, who had trained this cadre of Puerto Ricans who identified with the Indian culture in Puerto Rico, and their husbands. One day they came by, and we went to the Tombs in downtown New York and waved—that was pre-arranged. Then they came to the upper stories and waved out the windows at us. It was like a reunion of sorts. Horrible, but they were fabulous. I can't say enough about these people.
"MoF Series" 2024 Acrylic on paper "65 x 55"
HL: You have an incredible life history in the arts and in creative communities. There's almost a nostalgia that I feel listening to your stories. As you consider this history, what do you see as the future of the counterculture and of artist communities in the United States?
BB: Good question. I've become sort of discouraged, but then in thinking about this interview and my life, it's an affirmation. It's an affirmation every time someone comes in and appreciates the artwork and the stories supporting it. It's a total affirmation. I'm also able to do artwork here.
There was a woman dying, and she gave me 20 black canvases to paint on. She knew that I preferred to work on a white ground. I like to work on a white ground because the light penetrates the color and bounces off the white back through the color, so the paints become very intense. Black, in contrast, absorbs the light. So the light passes through the color and is absorbed by the black and doesn't bounce back and illuminate the painting in the same way. I found by painting with very little pigment and clear acrylic, I could paint whole paintings on the black that reflected the light, but you couldn't see them. When you look at the canvas, it looks like an all-black canvas. When you walk by it, it all of a sudden becomes alive with activity. It's reflecting the light, but it's done with clear acrylic. It's a whole painting that you can't see unless you see it obliquely with reflected light. Anyway, I learned how to make these paintings on black that are terrific.
"matters of the heart" 1981 Alkyd enamel on cardboard 15'x 10'
HL: How does that connect with the woman who gave you these canvases and your view on the future of counterculture and artist communities?
BB: Good question. I'm naturally a hopeful person. I think in order to make art, it's an affirmation. You get back more than you give. To be in a life of art is an affirmation in itself. I don't like to think about the bigger picture, about who the president is and who they are not, because it's so flimsy. I realize when I'm saying that I'm deliberately missing a whole lot. But I think that it'll pass. I don't know.
Here at the museum, my wife, Maria, writes all the grants, and we haven't been getting grants for two years now. Part of that is the trouble with the administration, and part of it is getting older and moving on. What we're looking for is someone to take this museum into the future. We believe in the counterculture. I have a good story to explain it.
Dean Fleming is the kind of person who makes art every single day, and he accumulates nothing. You go to his studio, which is a dome, and it looks pretty much like it did 50 years ago. Most people participate in the culture by buying stuff, getting stuff, accumulating stuff, like I do here at the museum. But Dean Fleming is... I once visited him, and he offered me lunch. He was grinding grass to eat grass, like John Muir or something. But anyway, the only thing I've seen Dean accumulate is artwork and maybe music. He loves music, but he gets it at the secondhand music store, and every album I pick up has Dean's name written on it. He takes the record out, copies it, and then sells it back or trades it for another. And he has a great collection of music. That's about the only thing that you might say he accumulates. But I wouldn't even say that.
It's a revolutionary act to not participate in the system of material accumulation. Therefore, you're the enemy of corporate America. This whole episode here, where we walk a fine line at the museum, is because we do accumulate materials, goods, and artwork. But I appreciate someone like Dean. He's the only person I know that's not participating in the larger picture.
Hugh Leeman: Brendt Berger, that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing your stories.
Brendt Berger: Thank you.
