Biography

Benny Fountain is a painter and art educator who was born in Moscow, Idaho. He received his BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR in 2005, and MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA in 2008, during which time he also studied in Rome, Italy. After spending two decades away from his home region (most recently in Texas teaching at Baylor University from 2013 -2023), Fountain was compelled to return and deepen his painting practice in the landscape of the Palouse and to teach Drawing and Painting at Whitworth University. Fountain is a recipient of a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholarship, a Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency, and in 2022 he was Resident Fellow at the American College of the Atlantic in Aix-en-Provence, France. His work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions such as the Royal Scottish Academy of Art, where he was awarded the Meyer Oppenheim prize; The Drawing Center, The Bowery, and First Street Gallery in New York, NY; and the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Halle Ford Museum of Art at Willamette university. Since returning to Spokane in 2023, Fountain has been creating a body of paintings from a rustic hilltop studio shack in the Palouse region accessible only by foot. These largescale outdoor paintings were recently exhibited in Fountain’s eighth solo exhibition at the Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon in July 2025.