Being Scott Seekins

He had always felt like an outsider; why not literally wear his status on his sleeve? Plus, he just dug the aesthetic. “Gray or plaid was very Minnesotan, and I wanted something distinct,” he says. At the age of twenty-one, he committed to the black and white on the spot and, amazingly, for the rest of his life.

Public reaction was harsh, especially when it came to applying for jobs. “When the people I came to interview with saw me coming,” he says, “they would just point and say, ‘The door is that way.’ ” Parents of girlfriends were also a tough sell. “I’ve literally seen them back down the basement stairs after meeting me and say, ‘Oh, my God, where have we gone wrong?’ ” he says. “Seriously, I’ve heard that.”

His family and friends were supportive, but even they had their doubts. “At first I thought it was silly,” Hushcha says. “But I’m fine with whatever Scott does. He’s like Yorick from Hamlet—a man of infinite jest and most excellent fancy.”

Seekins had found himself. Now he needed to find a career.

After MCAD, he took a series of day jobs—the most challenging of which was teaching fifth grade at Our Lady of Victory in the northern burbs. (“I would read the textbook one day ahead of the students”)—and concentrated on painting at night. He kept this up until 1972 when he made the bold but slightly insane decision to be a full-time artist.

It worked out nicely except for one thing: money. He never had any. His solution was brutally simple. “I didn’t eat,” he says.

In the mid-1970s, he and Hushcha and a handful of classmates and others decided that poverty loves company and formed Fort Mango, an arts collective. They pooled resources, put on shows, sold pieces, and stayed together until 1982. He thrived in the supportive environment.

Thomas Barry, who runs an eponymous gallery in Minneapolis, remembers Seekins’s early work. “The thing that stuck out about him was his range,” he says. “I showed him back in 1981, and since then I have included him in any group show I do—portrait shows, abstract shows, whatever. He really studies art history and is a master of the materials and the medium he chooses to work in.”

During this time, Seekins developed his now-Warholian reputation for being relentlessly public (a gallery opening isn’t official until he shows up) and shamelessly self-promoting (he has papered an entire wall in his studio with articles about himself). Yet considering his commitment to mass exposure, he surprisingly isn’t naturally gregarious. “He’s actually really shy,” says Hushcha. “When I met him at MCAD he would just follow me and my friends around, not say much. He still doesn’t say much. But he loves ink, and he loves the fact that we’re talking about him right now.”

Seekins managed to eke out a living through the ’80s and early ’90s, selling, among other things, images of the Madonna, of which he made hundreds. (He still makes them.) “I just had this vision where I felt Mary was a positive energy for me,” he says. “It’s not a religious thing. It’s more that she’s a decorative icon, and it makes for pretty art.”

But he was still searching for a major conceptual breakthrough. One arrived in 1995, oddly, in the form of Timothy McVeigh. “There was a picture of him in the newspaper after the Oklahoma City bombing, and I decided to sketch myself over his face,” Seekins says. “I showed it to Gus Gustafson and Larry Marcus and they laughed, and from that we came up with the idea that, because I have this distinct dressing style, I could put myself in history like a time machine.”