The Architecture of Belonging: Matthew Lusk on Art, Resistance and the American Dream
An artist on practice, persistence, and learning to belong
By Carrie Scott
Matthew Lusk and I became friends out of an argument. No really. I said something on Instagram that didn’t sit well with Matthew. He went off in the comments, perhaps a little strong. After DM’ing him to let him know that I was in fact a real person, we came to realize we both maybe had done or said the wrong thing. It was how all adults should communicate and resolve conflict. We’ve been pen pals ever since.
We’ve been talking ever since about art, about practice and about what it means to make things when everything feels fractured. But it wasn’t until we sat down recently that I realized the through-line connecting everything Matthew does: a desperate, gorgeous hunt for belonging.
Matthew’s latest exhibition, Crackers in Bed, opened September 14 at the ADS Warehouse in Newburgh - ten large encaustic paintings built on top of American quilt patterns, alongside sculptures constructed from memory. Go see it before it closes on the 28th!
The Moment You Stop Running From Yourself
Matthew spent decases running away from construction. His father, a general contractor in Georgia, gave him an ultimatum at sixteen: find a job in a week or work for him. Matthew didn’t find a job. He ended up working on a commerical building - the Moro Branch Library on the south side of Atlanta. Over the next few years, he worked every kind of construction job: brand new builds, renovations, avant-garde architecture, the King Plow Arts Center.
“Be careful what you’re good at,” he laughed. “You just might end up doing it for a living.”
While working at King Plow, he ended up moonlighting for a pottery company named Maddox Deluxe. Then he apprenticed through Ivan Bailey, a blacksmith. Through Bailey, Lusk ended up at the John Campbell Folk School in North Carolina - a place modeled on the Danish folk school tradition, a repository of folk knowledge where everything was taught in week-long blocks.
“I came out with a really weird set of skills,” Matthew said. “Black smithing, wood turning, basketry, face jub making, shaker furniture. I learned how to call dance, square dances and contra dances. I made a banjo. It was just a real crash course in making things.”
For a long time, his refusal to stick to one medium felt like a liability. Galleries wanted consistency. Collectors wanted to know what they are getting. But Matthew made a different choice: he would follow the work, not the market. Sculpture, painting, installation, performance. Site-specific projects that asked questions instead of providing answers.
“I wasn’t completely comfortable with that for a long time,” he admitted. “But it was sort of inescapable.”
How Getting an ADHD Diagnosis Changed His Life
Around two years ago, everything shifted. Matthew went through a period of extended depression. Nothing was coming together in his brain. He got diagnosed with ADHD - something he’d suspected for years. When he read the diagnostic criteria, “clouds parted.”
“There are like 12 points in the newest criteria and I was just like yes to like 10 of them,” he said. “Once you know that’s happening, that’s help in itself. And then any sort of therapy or medication is just additional help. You can really settle in and know your brain and know how it work.”
He talked about meditation - about learning to separate yourself from your own thoughts the way you’d watch a storm pass. About a workshop on manifestation where you imagine yourself having already achieve something, which opens your awareness to all the things that are already there that could help you get there.
When he imagined what success would feel like - not as an artist in commercial terms, but as a human - it wasn’t money or collectors. It was much simpler and much more profound.
“I was sitting in a room. A sofa and a couple chairs and a table. Somebody comes in and sets down some coffee and we’re just sitting there and we’re talking about ideas. It felt like I belong there. Like I had a sense of belonging.”
He realized that somewhere in twenty-five years in New York, he’d lost that feeling. In Athens in the 90s, he’d helped create a whole scene - collaborative art projects, rock and roll bands. In Chicago, more of the same. But by the time he’d been in New York for years, he’d lost the thread. He’d been so busy engineering projects and making work that he’d forgotten how to be part of something.
Resistance Is More Elastic Than You Think
Matthew’s work has been obsessed with the American dream for years. Not the greeting card version, but the real one - the one that’s fragmenting. He thinks a lot about resistance.
“Resistance is always more elastic because oppression is so inelastic,” he said. “It’s omnidirectional and comes from a single power source. But resistance comes from so many varied sources and directions that the power of it is just immeasurable.”
He talks about Daumier, the French caricaturist, constantly needling King Louis XVI in the newspaper. When Louis banned him from drawing the king’s face, Daumier just started drawing a pear. When that was outlawed, Daumier was found guilty and fined - but the punishment including having to print the court’s findings on the front paper of his newspaper. So he set the type in the shape of a pear.
“There’s always another angle,” Matthew said. “The resistance keeps adapting because it has to.”
He thinks about the American revolution, about how the British redcoats were completely flummoxed by guerrilla warfare - by the idea that soldiers wouldn’t line up and fight like gentlemen, but would hide in the woods and shoot from all directions.
“There’s something about guerrilla warfare that is always going to be revolutionary,” he said. “And to transpose that into cultural production is really kind of an exciting way to keep the imagination engaged with possible outcomes instead of just thinking that everything’s determined.”
Building Community Because You Need It
A few years back, Matthew revived the Goudy Wildlife Club in Newburgh, New York. Named after Frederick Goudy, the American typeface designer, it originally ran from 1948 to 1987 as a place where kids learned to make birdhouses and the Audubon Society came to speak. Matthew reimagined it as a space for experimental work, for amateurs, for first-timers.
“Evenings of performances focusing on new and experimental work, especially by first timers. And now we are going to be expanding into new and experimental wildlife excursions - renegade plantings or strange outings into the woods or counting hedgehogs.”
Then there’s Winters Ours. During the pandemic, when everyone was experiencing profound isolation and universal trauma, Matthew and his partner created a make-shift community center in an ADS warehouse gallery.
“We called it Winter Ours,” he said. “Winter, comma OURS. Because the most important part of that phrase isn’t the winter, which happens every year. It the ours.”
They’re doing it again this fall as Autumn Ours - at the same space, with a tighter program. A commitment to gathering, to being in public space together, to remembering that we need each other.
This is Matthew’s practice: making things, yes, but more importantly, creating spaces where people can feel like they belong. Building structures - literal and figurative - where isolation becomes community. Where the fragments of a broken dream might start cohere into something real.
“When I get to do these things, I feel like I belong,” he said simply. “Even if there are mistakes or things don’t quite work out right, it’s a real balm to feeling like you’re lost or you don’t have a place. Depression is that sense of being unmoored and unconnected. And there are things about the internet that exacerbate this while also giving the sense that you are connected. But yeah, I think it’s a …” He paused, then finished: “I don’t think I’ve ever regretted any time making things.”
That’s the belief that holds his whole practice together: that the act of making - art, community, space, meaning - is the antidote to disconnection. That when you feel lost, you make something. And if you’re lucky, other people gather around it. And for a moment, you all belong.
Matthew’s exhibition “Crackers in Bed” is on now until 28 September at the ADS Warehouse in Newburgh, NY.