Brett Douglas Hunter: A “Do It Yourself” Artist
Brett Douglas Hunter is a “do-it-yourself guy.” In fact, he admits to missing this interview because he was working on his car. “I can’t stand to take it anywhere to get fixed,” he says. “I’ll fix it myself.” Right now, though, the artist is in his kitchen. He turns the camera to show his handmade fireplace, with a firebox tucked inside a gaping mouth and a wide tongue sticking out onto the hearth. “It wasn’t easy, but it was doable,” he says of the project.
Hunter grew up in a do-it-yourself family in Illinois. Later, he fell into the punk scene—he’s been a member of The Copyrights for over twenty years—where DIY is the ethos. Now based outside of Nashville, Tennessee, he creates a world filled with brightly colored, humorous creatures while anthropomorphizing everything from his home fireplace to a Bonnaroo barn. Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, the late 1980s Saturday morning TV show, is an immediate reference point. “I feel like anyone my age making art is inherently influenced by that world,” says Hunter.
There are traces of Keith Haring in Hunter’s work too. (“He went full pop culture in a way that no one else really had,” he says of the late artist.) Hunter is also influenced by his grandparents’ folk art collection, as well as by his grandfather, Don Shull, who is also an artist. “He’s definitely a do-it-yourself guy,” says Hunter.
For his projects, Hunter likes to work as DIY as possible. “Some of the bigger festival things, I’ve taken on assistants or worked with a production company, but it’s almost hard for me to do,” he says. “Even that is pretty DIY on the scale of what a lot of people do.”
(ABOVE: Joyride Truck, Artville Visual Arts Festival, Nashville TN 2023. “Joyride was a response to my Grief Truck installation, a year or so later. I was in a happier place, if you can’t tell, haha. The Heart-Man is digging up some happiness and carting it in the wheelbarrow to the Joyride Truck, which has a massive pile of smiles in the back. The idea was that the Joyride is a “delight-delivery service” rather than a sadness removal one like the Grief Truck. I had always wanted to make an art car, and this was a great opportunity to resurrect the old dodge in my driveway and turn it into an art installation. Yes the truck runs.”)
“THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW COMPLAINTS WITH PEOPLE BEING LIKE, ‘THIS IS GROSS’ OR WHATEVER, BUT I FEEL LIKE THAT’S PROBABLY A GOOD THING. I FEEL LIKE A SCULPTURE SHOULD MAKE A FEW PEOPLE MAD.”
(Above, Top-Bottom: Creature sculptures at Creature Camp, Ashland City, TN, 2020 to present, photo credit Monica Murray, Even more creature sculptures at Creature Camp, Ashland City, TN, 2020 to present, photo credit Monica Murray, “Pink Polycephalupagus”, in studio at Soft Junk, Nashville, TN, 2022, photo by Monica Murray)
Since 2018, Hunter has been making work for Bonnaroo, the annual music festival held in Tennessee. “That kind of kickstarted a lot of experimentation, making the sculptures moveable, but still heavy enough to not blow away or be carried away by party people,” he says. In 2023, he transformed a campground barn into Big Pink, the large, wide-eyed face of a horned creature. Guests entered through the mouth.
“It’s a really cool way to share artwork. It’s not pretentious in any way. It’s outside. People are opening, expanding their minds and things,” Hunter says with a laugh, “and open in a way that they’re not in a white room, or in a museum, or at home.”
Hunter’s 2022 installation Grief Truck, which he made as a visiting artist at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, uses scatological humor to talk about letting go of grief. Made of papercrete, foam and paint, a pink pickup truck is piled high with a green mound of crap covered in sad faces. Nearby, a grinning, purple creature is caught mid-poop, and a blue woman is ready to shovel away the dump.
“I think it has connected with a lot of people,” Hunter says. “There have been a few complaints with people being, like, ‘this is gross,’ or whatever, but I feel like that’s probably a good thing. I feel like a sculpture should make a few people mad.”
A year later, he followed up Grief Truck with Joyride for Nashville’s Artville Visual Arts Festival. A Dodge pickup truck painted white with black polka dots, Joyride also features sculpted happy faces on the hubcaps and bumper grille, as well as a pile of smiles on the truck bed. The car is functional too. Hunter took it out for Bonnaroo’s Pride Parade in 2024 and, since the sculpted pieces are removable, he can drive it outside of art events as well.
Perhaps the most interactive of Hunter’s installations, though, is the campsite on his property. Hunter refurbished a 1960s Shasta camper, built and painted an outhouse and outdoor shower, and then filled the space with creature sculptures. The menagerie includes some leftovers from Bonnaroo, as well as ones that are site-specific. He’ll rearrange the sculptures when necessary and add new pieces when those on display have sold.
“IT’S NOT PRETENTIOUS IN ANY WAY. IT’S OUTSIDE. PEOPLE ARE OPENING, EXPANDING THEIR MINDS AND THINGS… AND OPEN IN A WAY THAT THEY’RE NOT IN A WHITE ROOM OR IN A MUSEUM OR AT HOME.”
“…THE NOSE MIGHT BE POKING YOU IN THE BACK A LITTLE BIT, BUT SOME PEOPLE SAY IT FEELS GOOD. THE FACE ENDS UP RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR UPPER BACK.”
(ABOVE: Grief Truck installation at Franconia Sculpture Park, Schafer MN, 2022 to present. “I made Grief Truck during a month-long residency as a Visiting Artist at Franconia. It was my first time doing any type of program like that… The installation includes a big purple creature shitting all of its sadness into a pile, a Big Momma creature to help scoop it up, and the Grief Truck itself; full of sadness, ready to take it away.”)
Hunter’s body of work also includes sculptural furniture, like a set of creature chairs: one fleshy pink and bumpy, the other lime-green and covered with a worm-like pattern. “I was teetering on going full gross-out on those, but they ended up being more cute, I think, than gross,” he says.
With chairs, Hunter says, he’s trying to find the balance between how they look and how they function. “I’m always kind of sacrificing some comfort for the visual effect with those things,” he says. “The nose might be poking you in the back a little bit, but some people say it feels good. The face ends up right in the middle of your upper back.”
For his 2024 show at Nashville’s Elephant Gallery, Cryptids and Crinoids, Hunter focused on smaller objects because he noticed that people going to shows couldn’t afford to buy the work. “They say, I’ll never be able to afford that, and they’re the people that are there making it cool and making it fun,” he says. “I wanted to do something that anybody could take home.”
Now he’s “bouncing back and forth” between large and small pieces. Recently, he made a creature mailbox for Bonnaroo based on the festival’s mascot. It stands seven feet high and takes up a footprint of six by four square feet. “I haven’t even made a weird mailbox for myself,” he says, “so I might start making weird mailboxes.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 73. You can still get a copy of it here. Or subscribe today for our latest issue here.
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