Just in time for Christmas, City Museum presents a special family-friendly reception for artist fnnch (pronounced “Finch”), who is unveiling a new set of Honey Bears at the museum downtown. The artist will be available for pictures and autographs from 4:00 to 5:00 pm. Art, merch and apparel will be available for purchase, or guests can bring their own items to be signed. Check out the web site for details.
I talked with the notoriously reclusive artist a few days ago. Here’s the way it went, with edits for clarity and brevity.
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| "Greatest Hits" Photo courtesy of fnnch |
Chuck Lavazzi (CL): Your Honey Bears are based on the old squeezable bear-shaped honey jars. I remember them from my childhood.
fnnch: Yeah, there was originally a patent that was filed on it a long time ago but it's available to any honey company now. So there are a number of companies who still sell honey and bears but the bears are slightly different from each other.
CL: I noticed that you've done a lot of other public art, and on your website there's kind of a manifesto that states that too much art ends up in the museums where most people don't get to see it, and that's why you're committed to doing as much public art as you can. But what made you decide to focus on honey bears?
fnnch: I was starting to do street art in 2013 and I saw a honey bear in my regular life and I liked it or it made me happy, so I decided to make one into a street art piece and I painted that out on the wall of a park in a neighborhood of San Francisco. People liked it and so I painted some more of them on some mailboxes in a neighborhood called The Mission and people liked those as well.
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| Photo courtesy of fnnch |
But then it started to feel sort of too repetitive, so I came to the idea of putting them into outfits. And so the first time I went out with the Baker Bear and the Pirate Bear, and it sort of took on the life of its own from there.
CL: There are several examples at your web site. It looks like you've even done some commercially for, I think, Shake Shack, among others.
fnnch: Yep. Yeah, I've done a mural for Shake Shack. I also did a collaboration with William Sonoma with bears on bowls and plates and mugs and things. I don't have rules necessarily, you know, and the art world is changing very rapidly, and I just try to find the best way to fit into it that makes the most sense to me.
CL: There seems to be a kind of a renaissance in street art lately. Is that just my perception or would you say that's a valid statement?
fnnch: I think that's a valid statement. What I have noticed is that the pandemic was a great boon to street art because for one thing, you had all these boarded up storefronts, which just became blank and clearly temporary and very appealing canvases for artists.
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| "Sea Turtles" Photo courtesy of fnnch |
Also, people had a lot extra time on their hands. And so it seems like a lot of people who maybe weren't active became active again, or people who had thought about it were finally willing to or finally had the time to go out and get to the streets.
CL: We go to Paris frequently and there’s a famous street artist there who calls himself Space Invader and yet no one has ever seen him
fnnch: Yeah, he’s all over Paris. But he does a pretty good job of staying under the radar.
CL: But as far as your own street art is concerned, you don’t try to hide that you’ve done it.
fnnch: Well, I try to stay pseudo-anonymous like Space Invader—hence the name fnnch and not being on video—but I’m a little more relaxed. That’s why I’m willing to come to an event at City Museum but I just try to stay out of photos. Everybody draws their line somewhere. I prefer to meet people in person and stay engaged, but I just try to stay off the Internet.
CL: So how did you come to pursue this particular kind of art?
fnnch: I got into street art first and I got into that, I guess, because I grew up with a lot of art in my house. In college I started to buy my first prints to put on the wall and then I thought this was something I could do myself. I feel like I get some satisfaction or self-actualization out of art—some sort of positive benefits.
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| "Big Penguin" Photo courtesy of fnnch |
And it feels like most people don't get that. Most people just don't have any regular engagement with any kind of visual art. Most people can name three actors or actresses or musicians who made a million dollars last year, but if you ask for three visual artists you probably won’t get a single name. And if you were to name the top ten most commercially successful artists in the world—Damien Hurst, Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, Jasper Johns, whoever—nobody has any idea who these people are.
So if you're starting from there, you want to make things that meet people where they are, and you want to make things that people can actually like.
Trying to get people to jump into the mainstream of contemporary art, which is extremely esoteric and frankly quite alienating and oftentimes expensive to access, it's kind of a non-starter.
When I got into doing the street art, I realized that it wasn't enough simply to make art and sell art. I wanted to work on a project that was made slightly bigger. I'm certainly not going to single handedly solve this problem or even make a giant dent in it, but I'm just trying to do my part.
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| Photo courtesy of fnnch |
CL: Looking at your street art, I see that animals seem to appear often in your work. Is that one of your main interests?
fnnch: Yeah, I like animals. I feel like to some degree, you appreciate what's around you and we're entering this weird period where basically if it's not cute or something that provides lot of utility to humans, it's just going to go extinct.
And, you know, there's a certain majesty to large numbers of some animals. One of the things that really strikes me when I'm back in St. Louis, and I look out the window, the number of birds in St. Louis compared to San Francisco, it's like a thousand times more birds. It's ridiculous. And I don't know what the cause of that is.
CL: I think the reasons you're seeing more of them in St. Louis are: A) more trees and B) more people with little gardens that attract birds.
And bringing up St. Louis, of course, reminds me that you are from here originally—from Kirkwood, I think?
fnnch: Yep.
CL: What took you on your journey over to the west coast?
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| "Dreamers Mural" Photo courtesy of fnnch |
fnnch: I came out here to go to Stanford and kind of just stayed, but just about everybody on my mom’s side of the family is back in St. Louis. So I'm back maybe three times a year on the visit. I'll be back for the holidays, which is why we're scheduling this City Museum event then, but I was back to do the painting maybe two months ago and kind of did the rounds, you know, saying hi to friends, family and whatnot.
CL: So let’s talk about the City Museum event in a bit more detail.
fnnch: Oh, cool. So it's supposed to be very casual. I did ten honey bears around the museum painted directly on the wall, themed after the area that they're in. So there's a baby bear that's in toddler town with a diaper and like a pinky. And then there's like a bear with opera glasses in the opera room, and there's a bear with a welding torch around welded metal.
And it's supposed to be like a scavenger hunt. They're not necessarily hidden, but it's a large museum, so if you wanted to find all ten you’d have to sort of know your way around. So we just wanted a chance to have an opening for it, meet people and say hi.
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City Museum is a unique art gallery, performance space, and all-ages playground created in the former International Shoe Building in downtown St. Louis by the late artist Bob Cassilly and his then-wife Gail Cassilly. For more information, visit the City Museum web site.
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