1942-2012

Barton Lidice Benes was born in 1942 in Westwood, New Jersey, and educated in the early 1960s at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Benes became internationally known in the 1980s as the "money artist,” a period when he used recycled currency as a collage medium on sculptural and flat forms. More recently, Benes began making “Museum Pieces,” displays of collectible objects (often belonging to well-known personalities) and relics which he mounts, labels, and places in museum-like containers. Benes passed away in 2012 of acute kidney failure.