Stephen Hendee

For more than three decades, Stephen Hendee has refined a techno-futurist aesthetic that is both dystopian and filled with longing. A pioneer of the low-poly aesthetic, he translates the vectorized geometry of virtual design into physical materials. Inspired by digital culture and science fiction, Hendee's real-world simulations of virtual spaces, topographic-like drawings, and intricate sculptures and prints imagine speculative creatures, spaces, and forms. As our dependence on technology deepens, Hendee's work counters with a warning.

Presciently highlighting the dark potential of technology-human interplay since the dawn of the internet, Hendee’s work is more urgent than ever as we catapult into an uncertain artificial intelligence-driven future.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Your career has spanned decades, and you’ve created everything from drawings to immersive architectural installations to small 3-D printed objects. What’s the throughline?

Stephen Hendee

I keep returning to a challenge to myself to develop things spontaneously, and what that means for the spontaneous relationship between an object and the material that I'm working with. How can I create a compelling object that is also creative in the moment when I'm building it? They're not just entirely for the viewers. They're also this relationship that I have with the material and how I can challenge myself to make something that I have not made before, or make it in a way that I haven't made it before. What am I learning from a process?

Some of my ideas—they don't have a standard connection that might be found within a contemporary art dialogue. I feel fortunate on some level that I've been able to just survive and continue to make work and feel committed to it so that I can just say, well, this is the way I do things. I mean, I make abstract, modernist sculptures that light up and I also make pinball machines.

I love making objects, I have since I was a teenager. And I'm also careful and conscious and wanting to consider what is occurring in society. All the artwork that motivated me has been made by people who wanted to contribute content. They wanted to say, well, this is what we're seeing at this moment. This is important. We don't want people to forget this moment. Let's talk about what's occurring here.

It could be Henry Moore, whose sole focus was his sick mother and you see it in every sculpture. Or Ursula von Rydingsvard's large timber objects that are consolidated and recombined and then cut. Those objects feel like they have a strong connection with this moment and are firmly focused in a modernist aesthetic. I'm making work with materials that have a technological content, they're about these virtual spaces. They're about industrial civilization.

Tell us about your journey. Was there a moment when you first called yourself an artist?

I was in high school. I was walking through a park one day and came upon two tables set up with checkered tablecloths. One table had two chafing dishes filled with beans and the other had a huge collection of salt shakers, and then next to that was a huge collection of pepper shakers. And when I encountered this, it just seemed like a piece of art. And I was like—oh, the fact that I see this as art must mean that I'm an artist, the fact that I can look at this object and see it as something far more than what it is.

While in high school I was searching for a path forward in some sort of creative practice. I happened to be exposed to a lot of really interesting contemporary art where I grew up, in Orange County, California. And so I was influenced by the local programming, artists like Chris Burden and Robert Irwin, and also seeing programming at the University of California, Irvine regarding surrealists.

I was really interested in this idea of making things, and with there being a conceptual iteration of it. I worked very hard to get a scholarship and I went to the Art Institute of Chicago for my first year. I transferred to San Francisco Art Institute, where I worked through performance art, video, and then moved into sculpture.

I was building, primarily, right from the beginning. I was building with metal and welding objects and fabricating things. Really quickly, a professional artist ask me to fabricate work for them. So I was fabricating work, making furniture for local clubs, and I had a small business while in school.

When I went to graduate school at Stanford, I didn't have the same resources or the same tools. So I started working in very inexpensive materials, like cardboard, which nearly got me thrown out of the program because my teachers didn't think that cardboard was a serious sculptural material. But I learned how to craft materials in unconventional ways, even if they were inexpensive. And those processes led toward me making the work that I make now.

You've explored themes often found in science fiction, such as dystopian worldviews. What are some of those influences?

William Gibson is someone I've read a lot and I've been really interested in the visual virtual spaces that he's described, which is consistent with the time that I was making my early work. His science fiction about cyberspace was written on typewriters, not computers.

Stanislaw Lem was also deeply inspiring to me—his focus on humanity and relationship to technology. I created a pinball machine based on one of his books about an artificial intelligence program that gains sentience. My pinball machine, called Golem XIV, is based on that character and the virtual space that the computer program exists in. There's a physical matrix that's described by Lem of what the computer's circuitry looked like inside of the building that that mechanism lived in and I was interested in developing the language that he was describing in the surfaces of the pinball machine.

There weren't that many artists who were talking about science fiction or the internet, or utilizing aesthetics or ideas directly based in it. Science fiction felt like it was segregated to people who are interested in literature. It didn't feel like a popular subject to talk about or use as a reference in art. And so I felt it was a space worth exploring.

You’ve been exploring technology across years in which its role in the average person’s life has changed exponentially. Has that changed how you make work?

The question that I keep on coming back to is why people have less time. In the past, when I was first making my installation work, I knew that people would spend time in these environments. They were willing to spend time in them and sit in this environment even though it did not have any dynamic properties besides the perception of the viewer themselves and how their perception was changing in that environment.

What I've noticed is as technology has been changing, as we've all experienced this shift toward more dynamic and more detailed and more active technology and our relationship of communication and our expectation of art and how dynamic it is, the time that people are willing to spend with any artwork has shifted dramatically. My effort has been to continue to explore what's possible.

What do you think the role of an artist is today?

The role of an artist now is so much more vast than it used to be. There's so many different kinds of artists and different ways to think about what art is. There are artists that are working at a corporate level, creating design for others. And there's artists that are working specifically for an art industry that is about a very specific kind of production. There's also artists that are working in public art. If we think about a studio artist, there are people who are motivated by material exploration or content development and they're seeking a connection with people who have a similar vision or appreciation of content and material—and that could be almost anything.

In contemporary art you have some artists that have the freedom to make whatever they want and they're supported for that and some that are working within what support is available. As an artist, I've done all the things I just described. I've done public art. I've done work for hire for corporate aesthetic purposes. I've made my own studio art. I've worked with collectors. I've worked with city and state public art commissions. Each of those provides a different opportunity to think about resource levels or think about what it means to collaborate with any of those entities. And it's changed my work every single time. I've thought about—how does my work need to respond to a specific context? How does my work need to respond to a specific environment so that it can be sustained?

Is there a failure or creative accident that you learned from?

Sometimes I will spend six months or a year developing things that don't end up turning into anything because I'm learning a technology. I'm learning something and seeing, well, maybe once I know that thing, I can add it to another process that I learn or another material that I start adapting and utilizing.

When I was first working with foam board for example, that was a creative accident. I never thought the result would be all of this illuminated work. I'm always learning from mistakes that occur within my studio process. Sometimes I make assumptions when I'm building something and then I have to stand back and just see what's going on with that work. There are unexpected results all the time. It's just a matter of just picking which ones are the right direction to go and to follow.

Do you think in terms of a set of rules that each piece needs to conform to when creating?

The rules of any given object are created as the object is being made. The aspects of it that are not consistent are taken away or erased. And then the ones that are the most applicable remain so that people can believe in the object. So many of the things that I've made are really about, are they believable? Are they worth focusing on?

At any given point when I'm developing something, sometimes I have to completely restart an object, or I may have to figure out a way of tearing away something and rebuilding it. I've had processes where I've had to build four pieces, for example, and then as I develop the objects, I realize that the first one needs to be completely redone because I've learned so much in the process of making them.

What do you do when you're not making art?

I'm usually walking, playing pinball, or cooking. Once a month I have a DJ show for Gutsyradio.org, a decentralized internet-based radio community headquartered out of Baltimore City, so I spend time curating those shows. I focus on contemporary classical, ambient, experimental, and noise-based music.

If resources were unlimited, what would your dream project be?

There's so many different things that I would want to do if I had unlimited resources. Building architecture. Architecture with music, and time. Making new kinds of tools, and utilizing those to make artwork. So a dream project would be a lot more sophisticated than what I'm capable of doing right now.

So when AI comes for all of us, what will it say about Stephen Hendee?

Hopefully it will say "ambassador." I wouldn't mind that . . . But I'd like to be able to utilize it as a tool. That I would be able to figure out a way of creating even more sophisticated objects in collaboration with whatever that system is.

What does Friday mean for you?

Friday speaks to the potential for new things to occur.

About the Artist

Stephen Hendee (b. 1968, California, USA) is an innovative sculptor renowned for creating large-scale installations that challenge traditional notions of space and form. He has exhibited his work at venues including the PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, the New Museum, SculptureCenter (Queens, New York), and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria. National exhibitions include the Smart Museum in Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum, and Rice University Art Gallery in Houston. Recent permanent installations include Meow Wolf Omega Mart in Las Vegas, NV (2021) and The Mill in Westport, New York (2024).

Hendee is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts ArtWorks Grant.