The Starns
Doug and Mike Starn are art world veterans who have made a permanent mark on art history with their works that defy categorization.
Mike (left) and Doug Starn. Image via Denver Post
Image by Voiid Studio via 1st Dibs
The oeuvre of Doug Starn and Mike Starn defies categorization, spanning photography, installation, print-making, performance, furniture, and site-specific architecture. The artists’ combined CV is black with ink listing museum exhibitions and gallery shows around the world, plus public installation commissions you can visit yourself. One such piece is See it split, see it change, a sprawling commission permanently installed underground at Manhattan’s South Ferry Terminal subway station in 2009.
Doug and Mike launched into the artistic stratosphere with their now-signature 2010 Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop commission, Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop. As the ninth most attended exhibition in the museum’s history, this interactive Big Bambú installation was continuously generating itself throughout the six-month exhibit: the twins and their crew of artist assistants/rock climbers built, unbuilt, and rebuilt the wave-like structure by taking pieces from the rear and adding them to the fore. Visitors have witnessed and climbed up into equally immersive iterations of Big Bambú all around the world, from Jerusalem to Japan to Venice.
In September 2008, the Starns took over the former Tallix Foundry in Beacon, New York. In 2018 we were fortunate enough to visit the Starns in situ at the studio, clocking in at 40,000 square feet with 50 foot ceilings. The epic proportions of the space comfortably house a staircase—made in the style of Big Bambú—that leads from the office to the work area. Due to its size, the studio is more easily traversed via the skateboards the brothers keep around than on foot. The studio is dotted with early career and current pieces alike, turning it into a sort of living museum for their multi-decade practice.
Together, Doug and Mike Starn have created their own artistic vernacular in climbing rope and bamboo. They noted in a 2018 video interview for the Louisiana Museum of Art, “Together we’re a single artist, in a sense, yet we’re two distinct individuals.” The brothers are distinctly private, shucking the limelight as they continue their conceptual workings in tandem in upstate New York and around the world.
Mike (left) and Doug Starn installing Big Bambú—Minotaur Horn Head, 2012, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome. Photograph by Sirio Magnabosco via MFA Houston
Big Bambú Double Helix at the Beacon studio. Image via dmstarn.com
Doug and Mike homepage thumbnail image by Thomas Canet via Wetterling Gallery
More Doug and Mike
Artist website
Louisiana Museum of Art extended video interview, 2018-2019
The Starn Brothers’ Warehouse-Size Studio Is Bursting with Bamboo, Ted Loos for 1st Dibs’ Introspective Magazine, December 2017 [article + video]
Visit the Starn Brothers‘ Sprawling Beacon, New York, Studio, Vicky Lowry for Architectural Digest, February 2017