Ben Whitehouse (British, b. 1962) is a contemporary painter, video artist and Founder/Director of SkyDay - a Chicago based educational platform devoted to inspiring young people to take a greater interest in how our environment functions, what it’s vulnerabilities are and why they should care. His work has been exhibited internationally including at the Crocker Art Museum, The Grand Rapids Art Museum, Gallery Henoch (NY), Flowers East (London), the McNay Art Museum, and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Ben also seeks alternative exhibition spaces to engage new audiences. In 2012 he created an installation in the chapel of a church and in 2015 he created a series of video projections for performances of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
Ben came to the US to study under Maya Angelou at Wake Forest University, earning a BA in 1985. He later studied under Vera Klement and Charles Harrison at The University of Chicago where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Critical Theory.
Ben is the son of film maker Ronnie Whitehouse and brother of Harvey Whitehouse, a leading figure in the cognitive science of religion (Oxford). The family moved to Hampstead in London just after Ben was born, an area known for its intellectual, artistic and literary residents many of whom care deeply about environment. His father made a short documentary about the dangers of pollution in our air and water in 1970. What he learned from his research for the film troubled him greatly and these issues became a regular topic of conversation in the Whitehouse home. Whitehouse has spent the last thirty five years seeking new ways to reconnect us to our environment. He considers this an idea crucial to the survival of our species.
Whitehouse came to the US as a student in 1980. He studied under Maya Angelou as an undergraduate at Wake Forest and later under Vera Klement and Charles Harrison as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. All three are major influences on his life and art. Ben first came to prominence in the mid 1990’s as a gifted painter of space and light with exhibitions in New York, Chicago and London that received positive reviews. (Artforum) Art dealer Charles Belloc Lowndes introduced Ben's work to Colin and Isabella Cawdor who subsequently invited him to stay at Cawdor in 1998 as Artist-In-Residence. By 2003, Ben had began to look for new ways of expressing the moment-to-moment changes of movement and light that inform our experience of place and in 2006, after much experimentation, he began two new series' of works - the Revolution Series (twenty four hour videos) and the Watch Series (twenty four hour paintings). First exhibited by John Brunetti at Alfedena (Chicago), Revolutions are something of a media first in that they are fully twenty four hours long and viewed in the same amount of time. Both Revolution and Watch have since been exhibited at museums and galleries across the US. Highlights include a 2006 Times Square installation of Revolution North Bar Lake (Astrovision screen) and a 2010 invitation from the English Heritage Foundation to make Revolution Stonehenge for which he was granted twenty-four hour access to the stones. Ben's latest project is Horizons, a series of colour field diptychs that focus on observed light relationships at the horizon of large bodies of water.
Inspired by conversations with Yo-Yo Ma and Ed Lu Ben founded Only One Sky in 2014, an educational not-for-profit with the mission of offering young people inspiring citizen art and citizen science initiatives on global sustainability. He serves as Executive Director.