“I am totally responsible to myself and myself alone when it comes to my art. There’s no wife, there are no children, there’s no lease on the building, there’s no checking account, there’s no nothing. I am the whole show. And that is to me the greatest reward of being an artist.” - Fletcher Benton

Born in Jackson, Ohio, 1931, Benton earned his BFA at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, 1956. He arrived to San Francisco in the midst of the Beat movement and Benton’s early paintings are noticeably inspired by this artistic and social spontaneity. He worked as a sign painter, which provided him with a familiarity of the alphabetical shapes which arise in his later work. Rather than working from sketches or drawings, Benton created a series of maquettes to explore the geometry and visual power of steel. Quickly abandoning typical painting or drawing, Benton composed sculptures that play between production and fascination. Balance, perception, kinetic energy and movement all inspire Benton’s various series utilizing rods, balls, sheets, boxes and edges of metal. Additionally, Benton taught at San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1967, when he left to teach at California State University, San Jose, where he stayed until 1986.