Jesus Benavente’s work is founded in performance and expands into other mediums including sculpture, painting, video, and photography. As a Mexican-American from an impoverished community, he uses humor to define and pressure the constraints of culture and convention. Benavente’s work places viewers in situations that allows them to explore their internal bias. Together the artist and viewers test and explore identity in a world desperately pretending to be post-identity. Formal elements and an informal attitude shift throughout the works, which allows the artist and his viewers to be both within and outside of the Western art canon as needed. These divergent practices and mediums coalesce to create a body of work that gives the audience and viewers what they want, and makes certain to also give them what they need.

Jesus Benavente earned an MFA from the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; LTD Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Performa 13, NY; Acre Projects, Chicago, IL; Find & Form Space, Boston, MA; Chashama, NY; Shin Museum of Art, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Kingston Sculpture Biennial, Kingston, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY and Austin Museum of Art, TX, among others.