Seth Cameron is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator. He was raised in the Southern foothills of the Appalachian mountains to a family of preachers and teachers before expatriating to New York City to study at The Cooper Union School of Art.
After graduating, he rented a studio with some friends in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and got a job writing press releases at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
A year later he organized his first exhibition, A Knock at the Door..., a multi-venue examination of artistic censorship in the wake of the USA Patriot Act.
Meanwhile, he established the iconoclastic artist collective, The Bruce High Quality Foundation.
Working across social sculpture, performance, painting, film, and literature, the Foundation challenged art world orthodoxies with particular attention to the branding of artistic identity, the academic conventions of art historical discourse, and the power dynamics of museums and schools.
The Foundation gained a reputation for what Roberta Smith of the New York Times described as "a sharp, well-aimed and unusually entertaining form of institutional critique."
Notable projects included:
The Brucennial
a recurring open call mass-exhibition timed to "compete" with The Whitney Biennial
The New Colossus
a bronze scale replica of a labor union inflatable rat installed in front of The Lever House on Park Avenue
Isle of the Dead
a mass happening and zombie apocalypse film set in the aftermath of the 2008 market crash
The Foundation has been included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, The Whitney Biennial, and The Sundance Film Festival, and was the subject of a 2013 retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum of Art.
The collective's most impactful achievement came in the form of BHQFU, a tuition-free experimental art school led by Cameron from 2009–2017.
The independent non-profit organization provided free, post-graduate classes, residency programs, exhibitions and events for a community of thousands of New York artists, and served as a rejoinder to the increasingly exclusionary price tag of higher education in the arts.
Throughout this period Cameron regularly engaged with art students, faculty, and administrators on the challenges of democratizing higher education in the arts, most notably through Teach 4 Amerika, a twelve-city lecture and workshop tour organized by Creative Time in 2012.
After shuttering BHQFU in 2017, Cameron has expanded his forays into the field of art education, leading The Intradisciplinary Seminar at Cooper Union, serving as Critic-in-Residence at the Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art (2022) as Executive Director of Children’s Museum of the Arts (2020-2023), where he transformed the 30+ year old organization into an advocate and provider of rigorous, free arts education for NYC's public school children, while advising non-profit organizations such as South Florida Art Center (now Oolite Arts) and Serving the People Foundation.
In his practice Cameron draws influence from Chinese literati painting, New Wave cinema, Romantic landscape painting, postmodern confessional fiction, and post-painterly abstraction, creating philosophically and emotionally charged paintings and literary works that ask empty cups to be as sweet as the punch. Recent solo exhibitions include The Tourist (2024, Nina Johnson Gallery), The Fair Mountain (2020, Nina Johnson Gallery) Sunless (2019, Nathalie Karg Gallery) and Suns (2018, McClain Gallery).