Waller Huntsberry Austin (born 1981) is an abstract, post-conceptual, interdisciplinary American artist known for Crayola crayon paintings and sculptures derived from his lived experience with object fetish. For a thousand centuries, artists have riffed on mythologized cultural artifacts alien to their native environments. Accordingly, Austin commandeers external ideas and translates them into his unique visual lexicon. Born in Durham, North Carolina, Austin currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky along with his wife, son, and daughter.
Austin’s non-linear oeuvre relates to a dissociative experience of time/space perceived simultaneously communal and private. He “absorbs the world around him and reflects on persistent esthetic ruminations.” Incorporating an expanding palette of content and artifice discerned by attraction, repulsion, and ambivalence; Austin seeks deeper understanding via mimesis with perpetual documentation in a post-modern journey of homage, play, and satire.
Crayon fidelity evolved from traditional painting media while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Attempting to maximize production and experimentation, Austin employed methodologies of Sol LeWitt by ‘farming out’ labor; commissioning peers to perform the actual painting act, translating his scripted procedures written after reverse-engineering futurist works of the museum’s collection. Informed that paint is defined as any combination of pigment and binder; he found health-consciousness in Crayola’s non-toxicity superior to extant works of acrylic and oil that continue off-gassing harmful chemicals decades after ‘curing.’
Crayon provides universality as an inherent catalyst for nostalgia. Considered ‘low-art’ medium by some; accessibility is undeniable even for self-proclaimed non-creatives, as we have all imprinted haptic memory with crayon as the first means of abstract visual communication before progressing to pencil or ink. In school, Austin felt compelled to produce large volumes of inventory facilitated by high-speed production potential attributed to painting. Professionally, Austin restricts pace of production, challenging his dexterity with renewed interest in the craft matter of youth. Conceptually inspired by iterative works; L.H.O.O.Q. (Duchamp -1919), Erased DeKoonig Drawing(Rauschenberg - 1953), and Spaghetti Medusa (Muñiz -1999), Austin’s work has been compared to that of Jeff Koons, Richard Pettibone, Richard Prince, and Elaine Sturtevant.
Austin’s development of multiple bodies of work include series of reductive minimalist curios, monochromatic text-centered one-offs, redacted historic cartoon screenshots, and ‘brut’ investigations. negligence (2018-) is an ongoing collection of color-catalogued crayon-cast pistols and bullets, for which Austin began receiving national attention after his wife, Whitney survived being shot a dozen times, and together they founded the Whitney/Strong Organization. Recognized as the only bipartisan non-profit leading the conversation on gun violence prevention through a focus on community-level and legislative change; their work has been featured domestically on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s Inside Edition, and NBC’s Meet the Press, and overseas on RTL affiliated stations.
Lacking representation, Austin’s exhibition history has been limited domestically to the mid-west and abroad at the Museum of Non-Conformist Art in St. Petersburg, Russia. Nonetheless, Austin’s works are held in diverse public and private collections nationwide, including prominent politicians from radical community progressives to US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as well as the Muhammad Ali Cultural Center.