Rick Fontenot is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the tension between our desire for order and the unpredictable forces that shape our lives. Deliberate geometry and material give structure to his work, while the shadows they cast reveal different perspectives within the same form.
His approach to making draws from a varied path across engineering, architecture and construction, and work advancing treatments for rare diseases. These experiences shaped an instinct for understanding how people, ideas, and systems come together, and how those relationships influence what the whole becomes.
His crookedbeard persona grew from the lasting asymmetry left by cancer treatment and a later broken jaw. What began as a record of hardship became an emblem of resilience and humor, and eventually part of his identity as an artist. His work carries that same willingness to find possibility in what wasn't planned.