A Conversation with Sculptor and Beekeeper Garnett Puett

When sculptor Garnett Puett encounters a swarm of honeybees, he doesn’t see them as tools for human use. Having grown up in a family of beekeepers, he knows that people and bees have been working side by side for thousands of years, in a mutually beneficial dance. 

For the past 40 years, Puett has sought to draw attention to this natural relationship by creating extraordinary sculptures of welded steel and beeswax, onto which he places sugar water, a queen bee, and as many as 90,000 honeybees. The ensuing results are what he calls apisculptures — the products of a deep collaboration between human and insect.

The pieces are as compelling as they are unique, and they won him renown in the New York City art world of the 1980s and ’90s — before he left the gallery scene and moved to Kona, Hawaii, to take over his stepfather’s honey business, Big Island Bees. Today, Big Island Bees is known for its pure, raw, unfiltered honey, created with nectar from blossoms like lehua, macadamia nut, and Christmasberry.

Bluedot contributor Christopher Lysik recently spoke with Puett about his unique approach to art, the challenges facing bees today, and the trickiness of housing thousands of bees in New York City.

CHRISTOPHER LYSIK: Let's start off with a little about you. You came from a family of beekeepers?

GARNETT PUETT: I'm four generations a Southern beekeeper! Georgia, around the beginning of the 20th century, was an incredible zone for raising queen bees. My father had a beekeeping operation raising queens and running the equipment.

That was kind of the heyday of raising queens to make genetically better bees. The train up the East Coast started in rural south Georgia, so there was travel between the South and the North that made it easy to ship fresh bees. It really stimulated the whole bee industry.

My father died when I was 12, and my mother married his best friend, Jim Powers — the largest honey producer in the country. I learned the techniques of advanced commercial beekeeping through him, running 40,000 hives all over the country.

When I got older, I went to the University of Idaho to study the sciences, figure out what I wanted to do. Was I going to be an entomologist? Was I going to run this big empire? But later I transferred to the University of Washington and found architecture and design. I started taking sculpture classes — and I was hooked.

CL: Were there other artists in your family?

GP: My mother was a painter. My father was a writer and worked his way through college doing magic shows for money.

CL: So you’re at the University of Washington … what led you to the East Coast?

GP: I jumped ship from my BFA [bachelor of fine arts] program to go to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I said, I've got to go to the center of the art world. 

My MFA [master of fine arts] thesis at Pratt Institute was — I created this word while I was there — apisculpture. At the University of Washington, they were teaching you to make things like paintings, or building something that's going to last forever. And I just thought, “That's another vestige of overpopulating, overdevelopment. More… stuff.” I didn't want to build more things to clutter the world.

So I decided to make live sculptural pieces with bees that would give people a chance to rediscover nature. They would come into a gallery and see something, then find out it's moving a little bit, and hopefully, it would intrigue them to interact with the piece.

As my work became more well-known, my art dealer finally said, “If you want me to sell this work to galleries, we have to preserve these things!” So that’s when we went through the whole process of learning how to make these sculptures archival.

CL: Can you walk me through that process, from idea to final product?

GP: Well, when I went to Pratt, nobody had really ever done it. 

I came up with an idea: making a simple armature of a human maquette, adding a queen bee, and putting it in a controlled environment. I brought in some bees from the South and monitored it every day, waiting for it to get to the right point, then I would stop it. They gave me an old chemistry lab because nobody wanted to be around my bees! There I was, putting bees into buildings, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1983!

I got kind of well known for being that guy, who had bees on a building up there. But really, I was trying to figure it all out — and finally I got a couple pieces to work.

We started to scale up — I built these coffin-like boxes and put them in a bombed-out area in the East Village. I threw in huge swarms of bees. The whole neighborhood was fascinated with it … then started throwing things at it, destroying this natural hive just to see the bees go crazy. The chaos of it all was great, in its own way! But I also realized I had to go back to the drawing board and start designing at a different scale, making sure I had control of them so that they didn't get vandalized.

CL: That’s so wild. What did that re-imagining look like, in practice?

GP: I started using the Mac computer early on in its existence, to design models, really looking at the scale of the honeycomb and the scale of the sculpture, and how they integrate together. I would start small, then grow to see how much I could control the bees’ sculpting on the surface.

In essence, my designs are a receptor for their natural energy onto my form. I got to the point where I could build pieces, and about 80 percent of the time, the bees would do what I wanted them to do. The sculptures are sort of an artifact of our collaboration.

CL: I love this idea, that the bees are your collaborators. You're not using them as materials.

GP: Honeybees have been working with humans for a few thousand years! I really feel like they have a deeper connection with human beings than any other insect on the planet. You get to know colonies and they get to know you, the more you work with them.

You've got to realize, I’m not a “bee whisperer.” I'm just a beekeeper who understands how bees work alongside humans. If we take care of them and if conditions are correct, they'll stick around for hundreds of years in the same spot.

CL: But you still need them for your work. So what does “taking care of them” look like, in that context?

GP: Well, for example, when I make a sculpture — especially a large open sculpture, like I just did [at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles] — they have total access to the outside. They have an artificial feeding system for backup. It's built into the sculpture, so they can monitor both from inside and outside.

Once we've finished our collaboration, they go back to a normal hive and do the same thing they were just doing on my sculpture — just in nature. I'm not working them just to facilitate my finished product. We're working together, same as if I were harvesting honey.

CL: Is there something that keeps you returning to this particular type of sculpture?

GP: I like design and structure — that’s what I find in the bee colony! These animals know how to survive. The structures they build are tied to gravity and electromagnetic radiation. All of these things — how they see, smell, and build — are based on these incredible senses that we don't know. It fascinates me. 

This work also forces you to develop a work ethic. If you don't take care of your equipment or your bees … they will leave the day you start neglecting them. A lot of hobbyists have found that out over the last 25 years of Save the Bee programs. It's tough, tough work.

CL: Is that dedication to the bees what led you away from the art scene and back to traditional beekeeping, in the 1990s? I mean, you were in New York for a long while. You were having real success.

GP: New York was in a renaissance. The boom of the economy during the Reagan years created a huge amount of money being spent on film, music, visual art, everything. I had lists of people waiting for my work.

But … I really started to feel like, what am I doing this for? I'm trying all this stuff to get people to be more interactive with art, but now I’m on a treadmill making work for collectors. 

Eventually, we had children, and we were going back and forth to Kona, Hawaii, where my stepfather’s business was. At that time, he was very ill, and getting out of the business — and he offered me to be a partner.

I tried to keep going back and forth for a while, but finally we settled in Hawaii, and I made the choice to become a full-on beekeeper. So, I started working with contemporary museums like the Hammer or Cincinnati Contemporary Museum [instead of galleries] … I would get called to be part of some curator’s proposal. Which kept my foot in the art world, and my mind on what I wanted to do creatively.

CL: When it comes to combating the climate crisis or thinking about things like colony collapse, how do you see the role of art?

GP: Honestly… it’s difficult for an artist to be of any serious use in making people really understand what's happening. I think what my work does is it subliminally gets people to think about the world by looking at structures they don't understand. 

But sometimes it takes being scared to death — seeing a red tide in Florida, or forever plastics in everything we eat. It’s getting so dire, it’s almost got to be extreme for people to start to get it.

But we do need every creative mind on this to really turn it around. I’ve watched in Hawaii, the reefs go from an incredible underwater oasis of coral, with flowering plants and every species of tropical fish you can imagine, to now the reefs are dead. Fish are being sucked up by fish farmers. It’s just, it's a tragedy. 

Now we're finding out, plastics are in virtually every pesticide, insecticide, water treatment … It’s worse than we ever imagined. If I were teaching art right now, I would tell everybody to go out and see what they can do to help.

CL: Earlier you mentioned “Save the Bees.” That movement has been around for so long now, but we're still seeing populations really struggling. What's the disconnect?

GP: The disconnect is, if you really want to go back — how far do you want to go back?

CL: Let’s do it.

GP: The use of chemicals and the petrochemical corporations have made our world a contaminated zone at the expense of the taxpayer. Thousands and thousands of wells all over the country have been abandoned. Gases are still spilling out of these wells, all over the country. It's unbelievable what we've allowed the industry to do.

Then they use these petrochemicals to develop soil conditioners and herbicides, pesticides, on and on. It's just everywhere. You can't go anywhere where it's not found.

This affects all insects, not just honeybees and pollinators — virtually every insect. You could really see a day where . . . insects are going to be rare if we continue to do this.

CL: So for everyday folks, who are concerned about bees and insect populations, what advice do you have?

GP: That's a hard question. I definitely wouldn't pooh-pooh the idea of planting flowers in your yard that attract native bees and insects. Give them a bump of encouragement. But honestly … that’s the stock answer.

I think that real change has to manifest in more people believing it's a critical environment that we're erasing. We've got to really put the pressure on, which is really hard to do right now.

Plus, we need to support the bee farmers who are doing this right. You need to go to your local producer. That's another great thing. Go to your local guy.

CL: So, one final question. With all of the doom and gloom, is there anything from the art world or the bee world you are taking hope from?

GP: Oh … I think just getting up in the morning and being able to just see the sun come up. Knowing that there are people out there that are creative and looking for a better path or multitude of paths to get us out of this. You know, we're smart enough to create this mess. We're definitely smart enough to create an answer.

Everything is renewable. We can make things that are recyclable and sustainable. It's just a thought process. We have to continue to teach people, and teach the children immediately, same as we teach them how to spell and do math equations. Every day, I see incredibly creative individuals taking on problems, or helping educate others about a simple solution. 

I really do think the future is great.