Ben Werther

Ben Werther (b. 1998, Nashville, Tennessee) is an American artist known for his exploration of found objects and their social and cultural implications. A passionate collector from a young age, Werther’s work often involves the recontextualization of everyday materials, transforming them into social artifacts. His recent exhibitions feature collections synthesized through processes such as crayon rubbings of found handwritten notes, US state quarters stamped with conspiracy theories, and police scanners altered to contact the spirit realm. By treating these subjective and often idiosyncratic objects as objective sources, Werther seeks to present each item as a primary artifact. When curated together into larger narratives, these collections reveal the causes and consequences behind the construction of folklore. Werther received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2020 and has been developing his practice through an interdisciplinary approach that questions the nature of belief, knowledge, and memory.

“While a student in my third year at Cooper Union I had the revelation that the greatest single artwork a person could make would be to construct some form of (what is colloquially referred to as) a time machine. This would be the greatest sculpture. The artwork would end all cultural production because it would symbolize a collapse of all historical context through a means of absolute control through art. This would in turn negate the need for any analysis because our perception of history would finally be objective in full - in that we would be able to experience history in a one to one - in essence this would come to be known as the production of pure truth.
My initial ideas had to do with touch and the ways in which it can be used to connote the passage of time. Some type of processing or mechanization I believed at the time would be needed to aid in the production of this artwork. It was at this point I turned to making rubbings of public surfaces.”

Solo Exhibitions

Townworld | New York, 2025

Everyone is a Genius | New York, 2023

Group Exhibitions

NADA | Miami, 2025

Sonder | New York, 2025

Sprezzatura | Florence, 2021