Shrine’s world
by Beth Allen :: June 2023
I recently sat down with Brent Allen Spears, aka “Shrine,” to chat about a new location for artist residencies that he has founded on a Flamingo Heights hillside property. The goal was to create a short video, sharing his vision on the Yucca Valley non-profit that has been anointed the “Highway Sanctuary.” Relaxing in the school bus he calls his desert home, we talked about much more than 501(c)(3)’s, artist workshops and bottle towers made of trash. Shrine opened up to me about this life — being a teen parent, evolving as an artist, traveling the world painting, creating massive sculptures, even performing in a circus troupe in front of 20,000 people — and how these experiences have shaped who he is today.
Why are you called Shrine?
During Burning Man, 2004, I was working on a big project with three guys named Brent and people started calling me Shrine. I build shrines. I build altars. That's why they gave me the nickname.
Tell me about the Highway Sanctuary — what is it?
The Highway Sanctuary is a 501(c)(3) artist residency. We pay artists to teach workshops that are free to local people.
Why the name The Highway Sanctuary?
Because we’re on the highway! Originally when I was looking for a place I was looking on the Highway 62 because I thought I could get a vacant lot. I didn’t realize that everything was super expensive and I wasn’t going to find any vacant lots on [that] highway that were affordable. I liked the idea of being on the highway because when people come out to Joshua Tree and Yucca, they are often looking for pristine land with boulders and Joshua trees. I wanted to leave that land alone. I wanted something that was thrashed. I feel like if it’s on the highway, the land’s already been destroyed, so you’re not going to be destroying anything!
When was this?
The last three years.
And how did this place end up being “the place?”
I was with our realtor in this area and we came up on this hill and saw a listing for this place. I was like, if you can get this, this is it, because this was the first place that I looked at where there was a view.
So you bought this place?
I didn’t buy it, somebody else bought it. It is owned by Highway Sanctuary, LLC.
“In the world I want to live in, artists are paid, because I think that what artists do is valuable.”
Why the hi-desert?
I love it out here, I’ve been coming out here every year since I was 19. I thought I could afford something out here and I had a warehouse full of stuff that had to be moved immediately.
This was at the beginning of the pandemic. I was booked six months out. In one week it was all canceled. My stuff was in a warehouse in Los Angeles for staging.
The staging rental place had to sell one of their warehouses in Las Vegas, and consolidate everything into half the warehouse in Los Angeles. The other half was going to be rented to growers so they could stay in business. And I was in that other half. I was taking up a huge amount of space with these giant installations that I have. Now they’re all in that 99 Cent store semi-truck. I didn't have a lot of time, I didn’t have a lot of money, and I just came out here on a whim. I saw five acres for $30,000 and I went to check it out.
When you go and look at the land as opposed to what’s in the photographs… there was a huge tweaker camp that was directly across the street, that was not in the photos. The RV on the land was half stripped. It was also a crazy ravine riverbed. You couldn’t build there. It was five acres of pretty much unusable land. And I was like, wow, that’s $30,000?! I only had $10,000. I was like, okay, wake up. You’re not going to get any land out here.
A friend of mine, two years previous, had called me up out of the blue. He saw some of the stuff I was doing in Africa and different places in the world. He really liked the kind of art I was making, and he said, “I’d like to give you a grant for $100,000. We’ve got to figure out a way to give it to you through a non-profit.” And I was like, “Okay.” Two years went by, and we never did it. So I called him up and I said, “You know that $100,000? How about you buy a piece of land?” And he was like, “I like that idea.” And that’s how we got this land.
Where does this guy live?
He lives in Colorado.
You said the Highway Sanctuary is a place to have free classes, but what else? What are your goals and visions for the Highway Sanctuary?
It is about free classes, but it’s free classes for locals. That's an important thing to remember. Artists are paid to interact with people that live around here, and that’s free. Those are things I like — things that are free, doing things locally, and artists being paid.
This whole thing is about creating the world you want to live in. This whole idea about people wanting to change the world, or being in a relationship with somebody and wanting to change that person - you can’t change people. I’m not trying to change the world anymore. I’m just working on myself and working on the space that I occupy and making it the way that I want it to be.
In the world I want to live in, artists are paid, because I think that what artists do is valuable. And I think that they shouldn’t have to struggle and hustle. The contribution that artists make to society should be recognized. I think we would have a different society if more artists were not hustling their day job and were making their art. That’s why I decided to create a 501(c)(3) — so I could get some grant money to give to artists. I read a manifesto by Prescott McCarthy, a local artist, where he wrote about doing things locally. I really liked it. And this was all around the time we were looking for the land.
I came up with this idea and decided to pursue it, not knowing all the work that goes into having a non-profit. It’s a lot. You have to have a board. There’s a lot of rules. There’s a lot to pay attention to. It’s purposely designed so that people don’t do it, really, because it’s complicated. We are figuring it out. We have a solid board, a bunch of good people, and we’re forging ahead. We’re raising money.
How are you raising money to pay the artists?
I don’t like traditional fundraising, but we may do it. Something I do know how to do is make large installations out of trash, something I’ve been doing internationally for many years. And you take them to festivals, and they pay you. It’s a great gig. I kind of got away from doing it because I’m getting older. There’s heavy equipment, there’s transportation, there’s storage, there’s a crew, on and on. It is a great life, but I basically abandoned it because I got interested in doing other things. When you’re doing festivals, it’s entertaining the over-entertained, at least in this country. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t mind entertaining the over-entertained. That’s how artists make a living. But I started doing other stuff. I started visiting refugee camps and having a different kind of adventure.
I believe in following your highest excitement. The success that I’ve had in my life comes from following my highest excitement. I’ve never wavered. I’ve always made exactly what I want and followed my intuition. That’s what I’ve been doing.
We built two 30-foot tall towers, all made out of trash.
Who's “we?”
Me and Merlin DeMartinis. He welded a 30-foot steel frame in his backyard. Unbelievable. The guy is very precise. He’s an amazing builder. We’ve built a lot of stuff together over the years. A handful of other people helped with the manipulating of 1,200 10-inch food cans into can tassels. I collected all of those cans out of garbage cans in Los Angeles from places that make spaghetti sauce or whatever. Those places go through a lot of cans!
Where do you store these Towers?
In the truck right outside this window. There are two 30-foot towers there that we drove to Miami to do the Art With Me festival. They were the first people who jumped in and said, “Yeah, we’ll hire you to do this.” They put out a substantial amount of money. That‘s how we‘ve raised money for the Highway Sanctuary. Also, I paint buildings. I paint tattoo shops, all kinds of stores, murals, cars, people‘s houses, you name it. I did a painting tour. All the money I made went into the Highway Sanctuary, fixing the house here because it was completely thrashed — electrical, plumbing — on and on. That’s what I’ve been doing. But ideally, it’s not going to be me that funds this. It’s going to be foundations and corporations that are inspired and want to get involved.
Do you have to apply for grants?
Yeah, I’m learning how to do it. It’s just one more thing where reality and fantasy are completely different. Being the president of a board means you have to do certain things to keep your 501(c)(3) status. We’re doing those things and we’re learning. Learning how to write grants is on our list of things to do. In the meantime, we’ve made enough money to start paying artists, and we’re excited to do that.
How can an artist teach a class here? And do the artists have to be local?
In order to teach a class or teach a workshop here, you just need to be asked. We’re focusing on local artists the first two years simply because they don't have to be flown in. They don’t have to be picked up. They don’t need transportation. The house, you can live here in it, but it’s still a little rough. We had Dom Snow aka Elephantman Sculptures do the first residency. Stephanie Brockway is coming down from Portland. I had asked her if she wanted to do it before we realized we’d keep it local because it makes sense for now.
Are artists in residencies different than the workshop teachers?
It’s just artists. We're paying artists to come here, create a sculpture or some other piece, engage with a group of people in some way. We’re calling that a workshop. It could be, “I'm going to teach you how to weld,” or “This is how I make work; this is my process.” They could teach something or not. They could talk about their art, their life. They can draw on the dirt with sticks. They can do poetry. Morgan Sorne is going to come here and people are going to make sounds. It's wide open. We're not saying “We'd like you to do this.” It’s “Do whatever you want.” Maybe you’ll do five workshops. Maybe you’ll do one. Maybe you won’t do any. Maybe you’ll just make a sculpture. It’s all open.
Each situation will be different as far as how long a person comes and does a residency. Artists can do a day, a half day, do a talk, do a performance, interact, share their experience.
How do people sign up to take a workshop?
On our website.
The Highway Sanctuary grounds are covered with stuff to make things. Where did all this stuff come from?
All this beautiful debris, all this rubble, much of it came from inside the house here. The house was very intense. The stove was full of rocks. On one hand I really appreciate the dedication to weirdness that happened in the house. But at the same time there were some really unsavory things in the house. Anyway, a lot of stuff came out of the house including a little motorcycle. And I’ve been collecting stuff. I collect stuff all the time. I pick up trash off the street. It’s a way of life. It never ends. It never stops… although it has stopped a lot; I’ve reeled it in massively. There was a time where if I went anywhere, I’d come back with a suitcase full of lids, wire… I had an obsession with wire. I had an insane collection!
Anyway, I've collected a lot of it. I'm in cahoots with Rachael from Black Luck Vintage. She was one of the original board members. She’s been in this thing from the beginning. She is a great friend of mine. I painted her original store in Yucca Valley. She's always looking out for stuff. She’ll say, “I got a truck full of junk,” I'm like, “I want it.” She’s responsible for a huge amount of stuff being up here, and it's an ongoing thing. I bring truckfuls of stuff from my house in Pasadena. That house has a sculpture garden that I worked on for 30 years — the Haunted Shack Gardens. I’m cleaning that place up, bringing stuff out here. I go thrift shopping, I go to estate sales, I dumpster dive. It's just amazing to me all the goods that are everywhere.
Do you imagine the Highway Sanctuary still having events and doing things while you’re not here?
Yeah. The goal is that although I’m the president, it will run itself. The people who are on the board will run it, and the people who get involved. It will be its own thing.
Where do you live?
I have a house in Pasadena, California, but I spend a lot of time out here [in the desert]. I sleep on this bus when I'm here, not in the house. It’s for workshops. I travel almost constantly, I’m gone a lot. My life is living out of a suitcase and making things spontaneously one place after the next. I’ve been doing that for 20 years, and I love it.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a little town called El Sereno in Los Angeles, California. Back in the 70s, El Sereno was a very interesting little barrio. It was and still is 90% Hispanic. In the 70s, it was a Mexican neighborhood. It was before the influx of El Salvadorans and Guatemalans and Nicaraguans that all poured into Los Angeles. It was a Mexican neighborhood, and it was very interesting to grow up on a street where I was the only white kid. But it was great, it was wild, it was fun. There were vacant lots and ditches and all kinds of freedom. The railroad tracks were a block away. Me and my mom, we used to ride our bikes [down] the railroad tracks all the way to downtown LA and go to Olvera Street to get taquitos. But at one point, my mom moved to South Pasadena, so I went to high school in South Pasadena. My father lived in Venice Beach, and my grandmothers lived in Alhambra and Pasadena. All around Los Angeles is where I grew up.
Are your parents still alive?
No, both of my parents are dead. Actually, the wall outside here, that’s going to be a courtyard. I was working on it when my mom died, so I took a lot of stuff from her house and am putting it in that wall. It’s dedicated to her. My father, Wilson, “Son of Will,” as he called himself — he had a heart attack while having sex, and I think the cocaine probably had something to do with it. He was a wild character. He was the classic guy who dropped out in the 60s, was an outlaw, and my mom was a cop, so...
What?!
Yeah, my mom was a police officer. My mom was one of the first women in the United States to go out in a squad car by herself with a gun. There are some great pictures of me and her when she graduated from the LA Police Academy. Eventually, she got fed up because the police force was sexist and racist, and she was like, “Fuck you guys.” She walked out of the police department, and never went back.
What did your family think of you pursuing an artistic lifestyle?
There wasn’t a lot of guidance in general to do anything. I had a very free, wild childhood. I had a large influence of structure and compassion from my grandparents. My parents were wild people. There weren't any rules, there weren’t any guidelines, there weren’t any... there wasn’t any supervision at all. It was total chaos, but my grandmothers were completely rooted, caring, loving people. They cooked meals, they slept in beds with sheets, ate at a table, all the normal things. It’s good that I was exposed to that because I would be really fucking wild if I hadn't had the influence of those really, really sweet old ladies. One of them, Lucille Sunday, my grandmother, she's 103, and she’s still alive. She lives in Mesa, Arizona with her boyfriend, Gosho, who escaped from Bulgaria many years ago.
My family was supportive of my being an artist. My grandfather thought that ArtCenter College of Design was the place to go if you wanted to be an artist. And he was right. That’s a very good college to go to if you want to create other people’s visions. I didn't want to go to ArtCenter. I had taken classes up there when I was in high school. I’d taken figure drawing. I thought it was cool, but it wasn't for me. I knew I wasn’t going to be designing any products. I wasn’t going to be an illustrator. I wasn’t going to go into commercial art. I wasn’t going to design cars. I was punk rock. My grandfather didn’t understand that I was not interested in making other people’s visions. He actually took me up there with my portfolio.
It was so sweet. I had resistance to it then, but now I think back and damn, Grandpa, that was so cool. We went up there, and the school’s response was, “Your portfolio is good. You’re good enough to go here, but your grades are not very good. What we recommend you do is go to Pasadena City College and you take some academic classes, and then come back here.” That was the plan.
So I enrolled, but what nobody knew is that I had no intention of ever going to school. I didn’t like school. I don’t like the system. I think it’s completely fucked up. That’s a whole other thing. But what I was going to do? My dream was to sail around the world, although I didn’t know how to sail yet. But I was going to sail around the world, and I had a plan. I had a job lined up in Florida on a tall ship. I had looked into it. I had made a call and they said, “If you can get here, we’ll hire you.” I was 17, and I was going to hitchhike to Florida.
I decided to go to the first day of school anyway, which was a painting class at PCC, Pasadena City College. On that day, this girl, Fran Nicely came up to me with a handful of trash, which is ironic! I was very shy, and she came up to me and said “Do you know where the trash can is?” She was cool, outgoing. Her best friend was a girl that I noticed right away. I really liked her. They were mods, and I was punk.
There weren’t a lot of people like that around. It hadn’t exploded into mainstream culture yet. It was still a subculture, underground. So if you saw somebody that was punk or somebody that was a mod, you were like, “Hey, what's up?”
I really liked this girl. And she was also really shy. It turns out we became friends because Fran had come up to me.
So I decided to stick around and take the class.
Well, that became my first relationship — my first girlfriend, the first person I had sex with, and we ended up having kids.
She got pregnant, and we decided that we were stoked, and we decided to have a kid. We were both living at home. We moved out into a place together, and two weeks before my daughter was born, I was in a motorcycle accident. A really bad motorcycle accident with casts on all my limbs, and I was in a wheelchair for a couple of years, and on crutches. I ended up not going to art school. She also was enrolled in ArtCenter. She didn’t go to art school either.
So you two were young. You were what, 18?
Yeah, we were really young. And back then, when I was taking my kids to school, I had pink hair, and all the other parents were older. There weren’t a lot of teen pregnancies. There were no kid parents. We were the only ones.
We were young and we didn’t know shit.
We both had a lot of healing to do and all kinds of other stuff, but we didn’t know any of this then!
So art school takes a shit because you get in a motorcycle accident.
Yeah. I didn’t want to go anyway.
You’re a young parent. Now you’ve got two kids.
Yeah.
What are you doing? Because being an artist is not going to sustain a family of four — or is it?
Well, I had a couple straight jobs after the accident. My grandfather got me a job working in downtown LA, in a block long warehouse full of produce. On one side, the trucks come in and empty the produce. On the other side, the trucks all go out to restaurants and stores all over LA. It’s 100% Latino. My grandfather knew the guy who owns the place, and they gave me a job. I show up, and there’s no white people working there at all. I’m working there for a while, and these guys are coming up to me and they’re like, “Hey, you want to learn how to do the forklift?” They wanted to groom me to move me up in the company or whatever, and I wasn’t opposed to it.
I hadn’t been off the crutches that long, so I was still limping. Like after a full shift I couldn’t walk. It was intense. It was hard work.
My job was to take a pallet of produce off a truck and organize it, or take a list of paper and collect everything on that list and put it on a truck for a driver that was going to go out and deliver to different restaurants.
There were these two older Mexican ladies working there. I was collecting the list, and I was talking to them, and we got into how much we were getting paid. These women had worked there for like 20 years, and I was making a dollar more than they were. I couldn’t believe it. I just dropped everything and walked out. Didn’t say shit. Just walked out, never went back. My grandfather called me a couple of days later. “Are you okay? What happened?” I’m like, “Fuck those people, man.” And I told him the story. That was what happened with that job.
The way I became an artist is that I was making jewelry out of FIMO clay. I was making little Jesuses, little devils, little skulls. I was taking apart rosaries, finding jewelry at thrift shops, and wiring this stuff up. There was one store that I really liked in Los Angeles, which is infamous – the Soap Plant/Wacko/La Luz de Jesus Gallery. I got the courage up one day to walk into that store. I had my little box of jewelry and asked if I could show it to somebody. I didn’t know anybody there. I didn’t know Billy Shire, who owned and was running the place. I didn’t know that you call up first to make an appointment if you wanted to show somebody your art. I just walked in.
It was a place where all the different subcultures meet because of the books, art and the chachkies in the store. It was awesome, the only place of its kind in Los Angeles. Anyway, I went in and Billy Shire said, “What do you got?” and he looked at my stuff. He liked it, and he bought it all. And I was like, “Wow!” I was in my 20’s. I had never sold anything. I made all these crazy, wild paintings and stuff, but I never sold anything.
I went back and I was like, “Hey, can I make a T-shirt?” because the Soap Plant had all these incredible T-shirts, and Billy was like, “Well, do a design.” I made a design and he liked it. While I was there at a meeting, showing him the T-shirt design, we were in a little room with shelves they called the Bodega, full of all the broken folk art that comes in from around the world. Shelves full of charms, beads, chachkies, you name it. And there was a guy sitting there, and I saw him squirt out like half a tube of paint, just to touch up a little bit of something he was working on. I was like, “That guy doesn’t know what he’s doing at all.” So I said, “Hey man, I need a job. I could fix all of this stuff for you. I totally know how to mix colors, and I can make this stuff look old, and I can make jewelry out of all this stuff.” And he hired me. So I had a job at the Soap Plant.
I was freelancing doing scenic work, in order to pay the bills. The industry, Hollywood, it’s all about sets and creating scenes. And who makes all that stuff? They’re called scenics. They’re carpenters and painters. When you have an old room in some shot in a film, it’s probably a fake room in a studio that artists painted to look like an old room.
I was doing that. But I didn’t like it, because, once again, for $15 an hour, you’re making some art director look like a genius, and you’re not making shit. But what I liked about it was, the hours were flexible, so I could take my kids to school, pick my kids up from school, and not work when I had my kids. I was doing that, and I was working at the Soap Plant. And basically what happened, long story short, was that I approached Billy Shire and asked, “Can I paint the staircase? Can I paint this wall?” My first mural was a 10x20 foot mural he let me paint. He was awesome. He liked my art, he bought my art, he gave me my first art show at La Luz De Jesus Gallery. Incredible, right? I was painting kitschy, highly realistic, cartoony, trippy stuff back then. I don’t paint like that at all anymore. I started to become a part of that scene. This is before the term ‘lowbrow’ existed. Lowbrow wasn’t a thing yet. It was still underground. It was a loose community. Robert Williams, Juxtapoz Magazine, La Luz De Jesus.
“My whole life of defying the cult of sameness started when I was a young kid.”
Were you ever in Juxtapoz magazine?
I never was, no.
I was aware of what was going on at La Luz De Jesus and other galleries, the whole scene in LA, and I used to love to go to art shows. But as I started raising my kids and doing other stuff, I got less and less interested. The whole thing about showing art through galleries, if that’s your only avenue to share your art, it just sucks. So I started painting buildings. If you paint a store or a restaurant, people are seeing it all day every day.
I love that I’ve got shows going on 24 hours a day all over the world. I painted a bunch of walls for Billy Shire, at La Luz De Jesus and Wacko, and then a guy named Dan Aykroyd and Isaac Tigrett from the Hard Rock Cafe restaurant saw one of the walls I painted and wanted to hire me. They were doing a place called the House of Blues. I was hired to paint on the crew of the first House of Blues, and that’s how my career and my freedom began.
After I went to Boston and worked on that job where I made the most money I had ever made, all of a sudden I wasn’t hustling. I didn’t have to decide, “Do I want to pay the gas bill, or the electric bill?” I could make shit all day, and I did. And then another House of Blues rolled around. All of a sudden I was making really good money. I painted the first five House of Blues. After I painted the House of Blues in Chicago, I bought a house, because me and my kids were living in a one-bedroom, sharing one room. That’s the short version of how I got ahead enough to where I could make what I wanted to make. I wasn’t creating some other art director’s vision of faux wood or whatever.
So you bought a house in Pasadena. Why did you name it the Haunted Shack Gardens?
I was working on this sculpture garden, and after maybe 10 years, it was pretty substantial. There was a lot of stuff out front - some towers, plants and trees were growing. I was busy. I was traveling and working a lot, so I would be gone from my house for months at a time. This is after my kids moved out and I had roommates. My house was always kind of a wayward home for boys, for some reason. I’m a terrible landlord. People should water the plants when it’s summer in LA, but my roommates didn’t.
I would come back from trips and stuff would be dead, weeds would be growing, towers would have fallen down. It would look very shabby, like a haunted place. Every neighborhood will have one place where some old guy is living and it’s overgrown and it’s scary. And the kids are like, “Who lives there?” I can remember coming home one time and it was looking really beat, but I loved the way it looked. It was so cool with everything in a state of decay — because everybody has a nice lawn, everybody’s got to keep up with the Joneses, everyone’s got to pretend that everything’s good, when everything’s totally fucked. Everybody hates their jobs, they watch TV, they’ve got nothing to do, and on and on. My whole life of defying the cult of sameness started when I was a young kid. I could never understand it. Why is everybody faking it? Why is everybody pretending? That’s why there’s ill health and miserable people, people killing people, people killing themselves. People aren’t happy. These standards that people have where everything has to be new. Get the new stuff, get the new car, get the new clothes. Always new, the opposite of decay. Like death isn’t natural, aging isn’t natural, old people are ugly. We worship the cult of youth. I’ve been against that my whole life. So I’m sitting in my yard in Pasadena, appreciating the beauty of the decay, and I don’t feel like changing it. I started to notice though that the neighbors were becoming cold. People didn’t wave back. I’m driving a painted car. All my cars have been painted. I live in a conservative Christian Armenian neighborhood in Pasadena, and people have come and gone but it’s a traditional suburb. There are standards. You keep your house looking a certain way. Nice paint job, keep a nice lawn, keep it fixed. Don’t get too creative. I’m interested in freedom. I’ll do what I want. I bought this house, I can do what I want. See, that’s naive. And I have been very naive many times in my life. And I thought that that would be okay to do whatever you wanted. Something I’ve learned over 30 years of doing whatever I want on my little square, my little plot, is that when you live on a street, in a city, there’s an agreement. There are laws. You may not like them, but if you’re going to live there, you’ve agreed to them, whether you like them or not.
What I’ve done to my front yard is illegal. Straight up. If the city of Pasadena decides to take it down, I either have to come up with a lot of money to fight them or I have to take it down or they’re going to start fining me. And this has already started to happen in various ways. Right now, we’re all good, and that’s nice. I also care about the people who live on my street. And I care about people in general, even if I don’t agree with them, even if I don’t feel like they’re giving me the respect to do what I want. Rich people don’t live on my street. That house is a huge investment. Every single person who lives on my street, whoever owns those houses, has an investment. And it’s important to them. So if I’m messing with the value of the street by building crazy stuff and driving painted cars and acting wild and playing bass guitar on the front porch with the amp out and am like, “Listen to this! Want to hear my new song? There’s no chords.” People don’t really like that. I started to understand that. But anyway, the point is, I really liked that decay, and it’s like a haunted shack. And that’s when I started calling it the Haunted Shack Gardens.
Where does your creative process come from?
My process as an artist is pretty wild. There’s a lot of freedom. It’s all spontaneous. If you go on Instagram and look at what people have hired me to do, none of it was drawn first. Not one thing. Every tattoo shop, every store, every mural, every building I painted, there are no sketches. It all happens in the moment. I don’t know what the finished product is going to be when I start. Ever. And I like that. I like that journey, it’s exciting. I painted a nine-story building in New York on this crazy lift in my 40s. The physicality of painting a building is real. And if you’re not excited, it’s very difficult to do. I don’t know how people draw something first, grid it out, blow it up, and paint a multi-story building. What drudgery!
I can’t imagine doing it. I don’t do it. I will never do it. One of the most important things about my process is that none of it is known. It develops in the moment. It’s all live painting. That big sculpture I just made out there, it’s a discovery while doing it. How did it happen? I mean, the whole fact that I didn’t go to art school was awesome. I didn’t have anybody telling me how, what, whatever. My visual influences are heavily from my grandmothers. Grandma Spears, I would say hands down, is the biggest visual influence in my life. I went to Catholic school. I sat in Catholic churches. Catholic churches are these insane altars.
I started building altars when I was a teenager. I was really into Dia de los Muertos. I loved what it was. I loved embracing death. So many different aspects of it. My altars got bigger and bigger and bigger. They turned into structures you could go inside, the biggest one being the temple at Burning Man in 2008, which was a 60-foot tall, two-story structure with a spiral DNA staircase that over 100 people worked on. Engineers, carpenters, builders, every level of skill, far surpassing my skill level.
Many festivals, a lot of underground festivals — they’ve got jam band music, they’ve got DJs, electronic music. They have art installations made out of trash. It’s an international phenomenon. Many of them will have some area that is temple-esque to have some sort of spirituality. A lot of these festivals will have opening ceremonies where they acknowledge the Four Directions, acknowledge the land, acknowledge the people who originally came from the land, stuff like that. I don’t know if Coachella does that, but many festivals do. So at one point I was building temples.
As I started getting into building these bigger and bigger altars and shrines I was delving into this idea of creating sacred space. And then one day I had this epiphany. I was like, once you say that a space is sacred, in order for a space to be sacred, the space next to it is not sacred. And that’s when I completely abandoned that whole trip. I stopped using that kind of terminology. I don’t create sacred space. I create inspirational space. I don’t create temples anymore. I build art installations. That feeling when you go into a Catholic church or a Buddhist temple or any place like that, is a feeling that I love. When I’m making stuff, that’s what I’m going for. Every time. And sometimes you hit it and sometimes you don’t. It doesn’t matter where it is, what it is. And people respond to it because everybody likes that feeling, it turns out. All the people of the world are the same.
So you’re doing the festivals thing and painting tattoo shops — how did your work evolve into the humanitarian side of things and going to other countries?
I got into traveling and going to refugee camps after years of doing major festivals. I performed on a circular stage at Coachella. I did a water show at Coachella. I choreographed dancing, three shows a day. I’ve had, I forget, six or seven major installations at Coachella. Sixty-foot tall structures. I’ve done all kinds of festivals around the world. The experience was full and I had done it. And it is a great job, especially if you’re me because they hire you to do whatever you’re going to do. I’m not going to do a sketch for you. I’ll do a stage, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. Anyway, I loved doing it. It’s great. The money’s great. You travel. But it’s entertaining the over-entertained. After a while, if you do anything a lot, you get used to it. You’re backstage, you’re meeting all the great artists, you’re this and that, and it’s so fun. But at the same time, you get used to it and it starts to get boring. Like, I love painting big walls in Los Angeles, my hometown. But you know what? People love to see the wall, but it’s just on their journey of entertainment. All day entertainment. That’s what we all do. Non-stop entertainment. And I just got tired of it. I wanted to do something else.
We built a monument to autistic people with autistic people in Kenya. There’s a documentary about it called Shower of Love. That was one of my first off the chart trips that I fundraised for. And that’s why I don’t want to do any traditional fundraising, because I’ve done it. It sucks. Then I got asked “Hey, do you want to go to Haiti?” I went to Haiti, checked out Haiti. Holy shit. The corruption, all the non-profit stuff, all the money going to Haiti that doesn’t go to Haiti. And I had that experience. And then somebody called me up and said, “Do you want to go to a refugee camp in Africa? I’m trying to get land back and give it back to refugees.” And I said, “Sounds great. I’d love to go.” And, “Okay, we’ll get you a ticket.” I was like, “No, I’ll just get my own ticket.” He’s like, “We’ll crowd fund to get a ticket.” I was like, “No, I’ll just buy a ticket and come.” And that was the beginning. I went to Nakivale. I went to Bidibidi. That’s a huge refugee camp. You know, it’s as big as Yucca Valley. Easy.
“I love that I’ve got shows going on 24 hours a day all over the world.”
What did you do there?
I had not been to a refugee camp yet. It’s funny that this happened because I was hearing all this stuff about refugee camps all around the world and wondering about them. And this guy, Mike Zuckerman, good friend of mine, now, he’d been going to this refugee camp for years. He knew his way around the various ghettos and this refugee camp, and he invited me to come and do some art. We didn’t know what would happen. The idea was I would maybe build a structure, but I ended up painting some buildings, and painting with people, and painting people’s little brick homes, and really enjoyed it. I went back and met all these people who live in a ghetto in Uganda. They call it a ghetto. They’re like, “We the ghetto boys. You’re in the ghetto now.” And it’s intense, it’s really something else. You will not see another white person in these ghettos. There’s no reason for you to be there at all. It’s a completely different world than here.
People say it’s dangerous and would always say, “You can’t walk home by yourself at night.” And eventually, of course, I, being the person that I am, I would start walking home. But I knew everybody. I started painting people’s houses, people were like, “Would you paint my house?” I’m like, “Yeah.” It was like mind blowing, it was incredible. I painted with people, “Look how fun and easy it is to paint!” because it really is fun and easy. I like to break that mystique down. I like to show people, “You like my art? Let me show you how easy it is to play with colors and shapes.”
When Highway Sanctuary had an open house in June, a few people were asking about workshops, and there’s a big interest in what you do. Are you going to be teaching workshops here?
Yeah, at some point. I’m going to mosaic the outside of the house. And when I do that, we’ll put out on the website that from this time to this time you can come up and see what’s happening. It’s not going to be structured with a beginning and an end kind of thing. Maybe there’ll be a bottle tower making workshop.
You’ve gone to South America too, right? Like Ecuador and Nicaragua?
Yeah, I’ve been to Ecuador and Guatemala. We performed in Guatemala.
When you say you performed, what are you talking about?
I was in an underground circus-esque troupe that started out very primitive and quirky. For me that’s when it was at its best. But then we started getting professional dancers, hot young women... and I felt, “Eh, now it’s just like all the other dumb shit.”
What was your role in this circus troupe?
I was a guy with a big moustache. I did a lot of intensive character work and choreographed dancing. I opened up for Panic! At the Disco and did five costume changes, the year they were on the cover of Rolling Stone, Band of the Year. We did a 60-show tour with them. I did half the show, and the other people in the troupe did the other half. I opened the show. There were some shows where there’s like 20,000 people. I’m talking to 20,000 people for 15 minutes.
Talking about what?
I was hustling. I was doing my Circus Barker character. I was selling polaroids of the band.
After that, I stopped performing because I was just like, “It’s not going to get better.” You perform with all your friends and it’s your life. You’re rehearsing all the time. You go out there and you perform, and it’s amazing. And then you’re sitting in a dressing room by yourself. You get depressed because the highs are so high. The ups and downs. When you’re out there just losing your mind on stage, you’re just out of control. And then you’re at home trying to go to sleep. You can’t fucking go to sleep, so you’re up all night. And for the first time, I was like, this is why all those famous people OD’ed.
I was never famous, but I did enough performing to know this is what happens. Managing yourself as a performer is incredibly difficult.
It wasn’t like we were ever going to make any money. We had up to 20 people in our troupe at times. It was a labor of love. Rehearsing several times a week. And choreographed dancing? I was in my 40s. I’m not super graceful. My character was this kind of aristocrat that would fall down. I was great at performing because I’m great in the moment. I could change the lines, could change anything. I’d go with it, create a whole new story. That part I was very good at, so it never looked like I didn’t know what I was doing. It seemed intentional.
The biggest thing I learned performing is when you’re on stage, — whether you’re a musician, a comedian, a dancer, whether you’re Mick Jagger, whoever the fuck you are — if you unite the people in front of you, they love you. And if you don’t, they despise you.
So out of all of these things you’ve done, which includes the dancing in the performance troupe, building installations, painting, trash art, and so on — what as a human being have you found most fulfilling?
The journey of all the different things I’ve done — visual art, performance art, being a performer, being a professional dancer, all without any training – I have no training in anything – it’s all served its purpose and it’s ongoing. I’m still in it. I’m still in it 100%. I’m on the journey.
See, as an artist, you create something, and each thing you create leads to and influences the next piece. It’s a journey. There’s no end, there’s no goal like, “I made it!”
I want to see what’s five pieces down the road. I have no idea.
What’s a typical day in the life of Shrine like?
Well, lately the first thing I do is I see where the kitty is. And we get up, and I make my cat breakfast. Sometimes I’ll make a cup of matcha. When I’m in the desert, I like to look at the sun when it’s rising. I like to wake up and walk around. And if I’m doing what I want, then the first thing I’m going to do is go out and continue working on whatever project I’m working on. In general, that’s how my life is. I make stuff.
I like working and I have a really intensive work ethic. I like to work. I like physicality. Each day of my life, I’m in pursuit of inspiration. That’s what I’m interested in.
Are you happy?
I am really happy, yeah. I call it living in choice. Your state of mind is your business. Your inspiration is your business. So all this stuff about blaming the government, blaming your parents, blaming your spouse, your brothers and sisters, your girlfriend, whoever, the neighbor, that fucking guy, come on man! You are responsible for your state of mind, period.
I’m having a good life because I choose to, and I’m creative enough to create my life. You create your life. This is the thing about art. Making art is just exercising the muscles that you use to create reality, your life. You create your life with your imagination. So get busy and get creative!
