STUDIO
GROUND WORK JARROD BECK MAKES DRAWINGS IN, ON, AND AGAINST THE WORLD. HIS STUDIO IS WHEREVER THAT TAKES HIM. BY EVE HILL-AGNUS PHOTOGRAPHS BY TREY BURNS
2026 spring cohort Jarrod Beck at Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency.
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Jarrod Beck installation view 100W 2nd floor studio.
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he definition of a studio is a vast notion in the artistic practice of Jarrod Beck. He works in a sort of expanding cosmos of spaces with, at its center, a cluster of structures on acres of land near Terlingua in West Texas. He acquired much of the land in exchange for one of his sculptures in 2010. Land, sky, wind, and his work, which is given a kind of freedom there. “I call it the base, because everything comes here at some point in its life,” he says of his parcel of desert terrain. “And it’s also a place where the materials get to live together, which they don’t always get to do out in the world.” Here he pursues Disruption Regime (begun in 2010), cast plaster lines that fit into and shape the landscape. As well as drawings with handmade oil bars he can only do in the cooler months, when the beeswax and pigment stay solid in his hand. As well as the cast plantfiber paper pulp forms which the wind dries swiftly—works that are either permanent in the landscape or only possible there, speaking inherently of place. His practice expands outward from Terlingua by necessity and desire to temporary “satellite” studios, following commissions, the call of a place, or the logistics of an upcoming fabrication stint or exhibition. Rough, coarse paper scales, dried by the Texas wind, might shapeshift into something as monumental as The Moon (2017), a 65-foot-long installation that exerted its gravitational pull in a Brooklyn gallery in 2017. A rhythm loosely following the seasons governs Beck’s cadence of work: July iron pours at foundries in Indiana and Alabama, the oil bar drawings in cooler months, and paper always. Glass, he says, feels like an old friend “that pops up that you haven’t talked to for a while.”