Ben Bridgers is a North Carolina native who found skateboarding in the late 1970s and never really let it go. By the early ’80s, he was fully immersed in a scene often labeled misfit territory—a place where early skateboard magazines, DIY culture, and a tight-knit community quietly shaped his creative outlook. Skateboarding became the gateway to drawing, design, and eventually a lifelong relationship with art, all rooted in an outsider spirit that still guides his work.

He earned a BFA in Studio Art from Barton College, followed by an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, including graduate study in Cortona, Italy. Bridgers taught studio art for 18 years at institutions in Georgia, Italy, Wyoming, and California, where he earned tenure as an Associate Professor of Art.

For over 30 years, he has maintained an active studio practice and exhibited widely across the United States, with work held in collections in the U.S., England, Italy, and Japan. After two decades of bouncing around the country (and beyond) chasing artistic and academic opportunities, Bridgers returned home to North Carolina. He lives in Durham, still skates, and works out of a back room studio in a 116 yr old house - the old dust and settlement informs his work.

“My work engages both representation and non-representation, existing in a place that is simultaneously imagined, observed, and constructed. This evolving terrain is shaped through traditional methods and sustained by a deep fascination with the history of painting”