Shea Hembrey: "How I became 100 artists" at TED Talks

There are many artists, especially emerging ones, who aspire to reach success or at least due recognition. But that is not an easy task and few will achieve that goal.

A successful artistic career can be achieved through several ways, such as working hard developing technical skills, having a prolific imagination, owning some good connexions in the art world, or being good at marketing and branding, just to name a few.

Starting an artistic career involves creating artistic projects that demand knowing what one wants in first place, planning and lost of work. And after everything is done, there is the need to announce it and to show it to the public as to cause the most positive impact as possible, therefore leading to the expected results.

The TED Talk speaker artist and curator Shea Hembrey is an example of what has been delineated above. During his intervention "How I became 100 artists" Hembrey guides the audience through his early life, his artistic ideas and concepts, finalizing with his art project Seek.

Seek is a new international biennial that results from Shea Hembrey's idea of creating 100 works, each of them by a fictional artist, to whom the author even created a bio, and curated by Calinda Salazar and Fletcher Ramsey, also fictional charaters.

Even though the artists and the curators are fictional characters, the 100 works of art were all created by Hembrey, which attests the artist's capacitiy of developing a complex and successful creative process.

The inaugural exhibition of Seek biennial is available through a catalogue in a limited edition of 1000 that can be acquired through Shea Hemprey's website.

Shea Hembrey passed nine years studying art at university, though he continuously seeks to develop his methods and skills on his own. His art imitates nature’s forms, in an attempt to appreciate how humans have always appropriated and learned from forms in nature, which has led to projects such as "Mirror Nests."

He studied Maori art in New Zeland thanks to the Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship program.
Hembrey also owns an MFA from Cornell University.