Music Credit: “foreric piano study” written and performed by Todd Barton from the album Metascape

Matt Willey: The good of the hive is an artistic initiative I started in 2015 to hand paint fifty-thousand individual honey bees and murals around the world to raise awareness about their importance and celebrate their behaviors. This project that was total about just my two cents to help the bees turned out to be so much more about human connection and the human spirit then I had anticipated at all. And that's what really brought me forward with the work.

Jo Reed: That's artist Matthew Willey and this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced with the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Matthew Willey is a rare artist. For 25 years he was a successful muralist. Not only talent but actually able to support himself through his art. His work can be found in private homes, libraries NBA offices and so on but, then something happened and slowly Matt Willey changed the trajectory of his career. For the last two and a half years, he’s traveled throughout the country painting murals of honey bees on barn roofs in Nebraska, school walls in Washington DC, the side of a fire station in North Carolina. It's a grass roots operation, he's invited into these communities and they raise money in varies ways to support the work. And Matt talks to the folks in these places but, he listens even more and he has found that the importance of honey bees might be one of the few things that we can all agree on. He goes, as he says, "where the bees take him"-- and that journey began in a very unremarkable way.

Matt Willey: The story began-- well, it began about ten years ago. I was in my in my studio apartment and I was busy as hell that day working on something I can’t even remember at this point. And I turned around and a honeybee had landed in the middle of the rug, smack dab in the middle of the rug and it-- for whatever reason caught my attention. And she was moving really slowly, just walking along the carpet, not flying. So, I had this opportunity to get down on the floor with this little honey bee with my magnifying glass and I spent about two and a half hours studying this little bee, hanging out with her until she died. And I really noticed things like the hairs on the eyeballs. I noticed the legs, the hairs on them and there was a cuteness as well that I'd never noticed before. I have no background with bugs or conservation or none of my artwork had really anything to do with anything that would-- you know, in that realm. So, for whatever reason this was like, it’s like the first time I ever really looked at a honey bee.

Jo Reed: And were you inspired right away? What was the next step?

Matt Willey: I started looking on the Internet about honey bees. And I came across colony collapse disorder very quickly and was blown away. I had heard nothing about this mysterious mass die-off of bees. And I was like how do I not know anything about this? So that got me looking further and I came across the behavior of the honey bee that just blew me away and it’s called altruistic suicide. And it’s when a honey bee is-- if they’re in the hive and they feel sick, they will exit the hive and fly off into the abyss for the good of the hive. And this is where the name of the initiative came from seven years later. And I looked further and I found out it was because the honey bee's immune system is based on the hive, not the individual bee.

Jo Reed: Oh, wow, that’s fascinating.

Matt Willey: Right? And this really fascinated me. It got me thinking about my own relationship to my community and different communities I’m apart of within the bigger community and it got me hooked on bees. That one day I was glued. I’m a mural-- I’ve been a mural painter for twenty-five years. So, I kept doing my murals.

Jo Reed: When and how did you actually begin to paint bees?

Matt Willey: About seven years later a friend of mine, Maura, who knew I was really interested in bees, she sends me an iPhone video from LaBelle, Florida, of the site of Harold P. Curtis Honey Company. And it was like a hundred and twenty-five-foot wall and Maura said to me, “You know, you should paint bees on this wall.” And I was like, “You know, maybe I should paint bees on that wall." So, I just called him up and I said, “Would you guys like a mural on that wall?” And they said, “We would love one, but murals are illegal in our town and we have no money to pay you. And, really, we’re not going to be able to raise any money, because nobody in our town has the money to do something like this.” And, so, I said, “Okay, I’m getting a little old for running from the cops to paint a mural. And I’m pretty slow,” so I was like, “if you can get the law changed, I’ll figure out a way to do it.” And I just sort of left it at that, thinking “They are never going to do this.” And two months later, they called me up and said, “Okay, we got the law changed. When are you coming?” And I was like, “Oh, I guess I’m doing this.”

Jo Reed: Okay not to be shallow but how did you manage this financially? It's a miracle enough that an artist can support themselves with their work. There typically isn't any extra money hanging around.

Matt Willey: I put up a little webpage and I called the mural “The Good of the Hive”. It was just going to be one mural to raise some awareness. And I think I raised, like, four or five hundred dollars from some friends just to buy some gas money.

Jo Reed: Now where were you living at the time?

Matt Willey: I was living in Asheville.

Jo Reed: Asheville, North Caroline.

Matt Willey: And, yeah, I had bought a little beat up old Ford Ranger and I drove my little Ford Ranger down to LaBelle.

Jo Reed: You hadn't been to LaBelle. You didn't know anybody in LaBelle. What happened when you got there?

Matt Willey: What happened when I got there blew me away again. Someone put me up in their RV for free for ten weeks.

Jo Reed: And how did that happen? The people who own the company, did they arrange that?

Matt Willey: It was more there was like a group of people, like, the LaBelle Downtown commission-- like, four people that were interested in having LaBelle shift. LaBelle is not the most affluent part of Florida. It’s sort of in the middle, south, was a big agriculture community. You know, they had an interest in making the downtown more interesting. They were looking for an anchor to do that and a giant piece of artwork. I think they thought, “Let’s gamble on this.” And so, you know, I got put up for free in an RV for-- by someone. The restaurants in town started giving me free food, free salad bar wherever I wanted it. The coffee shop in town wouldn’t let me pay for a cup of coffee. They gave me breakfast every morning. And people started donating little bits of money. And the thing got fully funded by the time we were done. And it was just this element of altruism, you know, for something to happen where we took this leap of faith that-- it was a ten-week project. I’m not an artist that can just take off ten weeks. You know, I’m a working mural painter in that sense. So, I just went with a leap of faith and what happened was really kind of magical. I couldn’t help noticing that.

Jo Reed: Okay the next question, how did you go from painting one mural to deciding to embark on a multi-year project where you're going to be painting 50,000 bees?

Matt Willey: During the time I was painting, there was a cycling ride to feed hungry kids by people riding across Florida. And they made the mural site a water stop on the journey. And I got talking to one of the producers of that ride who literally walks up to me with a honey bee on his shoulder and he’s, like, “Okay, I think this honey bee is telling me something, because it won’t leave me alone.” And we got into a conversation about my work. And he said to me, “Well, how many bees are in a healthy hive?” And I had just learned. I was just beginning to learn a little bit from the beekeepers there that somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand. It can be up to a hundred thousand. And he said to me, “Well, you think you could pain fifty thousand of them?” And it kind of just hit me in the gut. And I was like, “Huh.” There were seventeen in the first mural, you know? <laughs> And, so, I just thought this could be a really interesting journey. You know, and I just felt like it wasn’t one mural, “The Good of the Hive”. And one of the things I noticed more than anything was that people were standing there connecting around bees. Just looking at bees these bees on the wall--

Jo Reed: And connecting with you as well, I'm assuming.

Matt Willey: Connecting with me. I’m kind of a people person. I’m rare as an artist: I really like the people part. And the-- so, I started talking to everybody. You know, and the Santa Claus riding a Harley Davidson coming up to me in, you know, the ninety degree heat and talking to me about his bees. You know, and I was like, “Well, now I know what Santa does in the summer. He’s a beekeeper.” And, you know, just talking about, like, what’s going on with them, but connecting around it. The energy was, like, in agreement. It wasn’t a debate happening on the mural site. It was agreement that we all need to save these creatures and really adjust what’s wrong in order to make their world more healthy, which in turn is a healthier world for us anyway. So, this project that was totally about just my two cents to help the bees turned out to be so much more about human connection and the human spirit than I had anticipated at all. And that’s what really brought me forward with the work.

Jo Reed: And then how did you move on from there? How did you find the next project in this initiative?

Matt Willey: Like anything else, I felt my way through it and some magical things happened. I came back home and was, like, “Okay, I’m going to do this. What are all the kids doing nowadays? They run crowd funding campaigns.” And I knew nothing about crowdfunding. I had zero social media following. I had-- I was word of mouth for twenty-five years. I was just-- that was my world: painting for private clients. And, so, I thought, “Oh, let’s do a Kickstarter campaign and I made the video and I did the whole thing and it didn’t get funded. It didn’t meet its mark so I didn’t get any of that money and now I had spent about three thousand getting the video made and everything. It was a little disappointing, I gotta say, but the thing that happened with that was I had reached out like crazy to anyone I could think of to reach out to. The campaign was a financial flop, but it actually drove me to connect with people like Phyllis Stiles of Bee City USA, who actually lives in Ashville. And, so, she connected me with people from other bee cities around the US.

Jo Reed: Okay, we have to back you up. What is Bee City USA?

Matt Willey: Bee City USA is a non-profit organization that basically a city adopts by-laws that say, “We’re going to take action towards the health of our pollinators-- bees and pollinators.” And they have to do certain things. And Phyllis had said to me, “Well, one of the things that they’re required to do is have an event at least once a year to bring attention to this cause” and she thought “The Good of the Hive” might me a great way, a mural for people to actually handle that part of their by-laws. So, I got a lot of emails about “Oh, I’m excited. Why don’t you come paint a mural,” but it was in Carrboro, North Carolina that they-- I got, like, seven inquiries from there and it was close enough to drive to. So, it wasn’t like trying to manage a project really far away and they were a Bee City. And, so, I got in touch with their city council and ended up going and presenting. They corralled all the options for the murals and took me on a tour and we discussed it and then I presented to the alderman-- I mean, I am not a person who has spent time presenting. I painted by myself for twenty-five years. <laughs> And, so, here I am suddenly talking to these people presenting this idea as best I can fumble through it and somehow I communicated to them what I wanted to do and they just looked down the row and said, “Who's in?” All the hands went up and said, “Who has the money?” And the tourism development budget for the town just wrote a check. And they were done. So, that was my first sign that, okay, this is doable, this is very doable-- 'cause I was letting go of-- I can only paint so much. So, I couldn’t do my other work painting sixty hours a week and do this.

Jo Reed: Right, the work that paid the bills.

Matt Willey: Yeah, so it was a bit of a leap to say, okay, can we do this?

Jo Reed: The next leg of that project was kind of a natural step. You painted a mural for Burt's Bees.

Matt Willey: Yeah the president of Burt's Bees, the president of the Greater Good Foundation, Paula Alexander, my dear friend at this point, called me up and was like, “Okay, if one more person emails me about you--” and she is like, “I have got to meet you.” And, so, I ended up doing a mural with them so we ended up going through the process of painting the side of the building they rent in Durham--Burt's Bees, that’s their local headquarters.

Jo Reed: Will you describe the Burt's Bees mural?

Matt Willey: The Burt's Bees mural is about the swarm, you know, I painted a big hive up in the left of that wall-- well, it’s a hundred and eighty-five feet long, but then I had, you know, about two thirds of the bees are flying off in this line following the queen. This very misunderstood behavior of bees where this terror of, like, chaotic bees, “Ah!” they’re-- bees are attacking. They’re actually at their most docile when they’re swarming. They have a belly full of honey and they’re actually just creating a smokescreen because the queen is flying along in the middle of that. So, they have layer upon layer upon layer-- between a bird that might eat the queen or something that might get her. Really you can stand in the middle of a swarm if you’re calm and you’re not swatting at them. They’ll fly right by. They have no interest in you. They have interest in their queen. It’s one of the most sublime, brave, natural occurrences.

Jo Reed: And, so, what are some of the factors that go into each design?

Matt Willey: You know, that’s changing. At that stage, I was really interested in the behaviors-- the idea of the swarm. The way that I worked for so long, my-- one of my old clients used to say, “Matt can paint anything,” and I had a versatility in my portfolio. I would be painting for an NBA team or I’d be doing a space library or I’d be doing a French traditional breakfast nook in Beverly Hills or something like-- so, every time I'd be shifting. I thought that was what was going to be of use with this work, was to draw attention to the bees and, like, reinvent what I was creating, so people would be surprised with the next one. But what I found very quickly was that the bees are what people love. So, just painting--

Jo Reed: The bees themselves. Yeah.

Matt Willey: This was one of the things that I thought, “Oh, I can do this,” because this tiny little thing that we have trouble paying attention to or seeing as anything other than this flying little stinger, you blow it up to two and a half feet and you show the detail and the beauty of them. And that’s really what the work is now about, is sharing that beauty of these creatures so that, you know, what we love we connect with and we don’t want to hurt that and we actually take care of that. So, that’s what most of the work is about now. But I still weave in my imagination. And I’ll get hooked on certain behaviors and then design with that. I’m in a big design phase right now with the next few projects.

Jo Reed: How many have you done so far?

Matt Willey: I’ve done a few tiny ones that weren’t really the full project. But I think the full, you know, the full experience of the murals with the discussions and the—you know, everything we do with the filming and videos and all that has been about ten to twelve. And then there’s probably 13 or 14 if you add in smaller ones.

Jo Reed: And have-- And then there’s probably thirteen of fourteen if you add in smaller ones.

Matt Willey: Mm-hm. We do short-form video content, but now we’re actually culminating the first two and a half years of projects into the first film, which we’re going to release this summer.

Jo Reed: And you have discussion with the community members that you also film?

Matt Willey: Oh, yeah, we interview people. The one I just did in DC was awesome, ‘cause we got interviews with the USDA, US Forest Service people and the Pollinator Partnership and it’s just where I am on site. The bees weave through every neighborhood on the planet Earth. That’s what I find so fascinating. They’re the one thing I can think of-- and I’ve been thinking about it for nine years or more-- it’s the one thing we can all agree on. It isn’t anybody’s. It isn’t about race, gender, nationality, none of it has anything to do with the bee. They’re in every neighborhood on the planet. And, so, it’s this one thing we can all agree on. So, going into those communities that are so different-- all the murals are different, but there is this continuum of the bee.

Jo Reed: Tell me a little bit more about the project you did in DC. It was at a school, correct?

Matt Willey: Yeah, that’s at Janney Elementary School in Tenleytown. That was a really cool one. I got an email with a little letter written by a seven-year-old named Sanna and she wanted to be a bee scientist and a dancer when she grew up. She really loved my murals and painted her school she would love that. And I put it up on social media and it went like-- I wouldn’t say viral, but it was the most loved and responded to post I ever did. And everybody was like, “You’re going to go paint that one, right?” You know? <laughs> “You better go paint for this little girl. She’s adorable.” And that instigated it and, so--

Jo Reed: Okay, how does it move from a kid-- a seven year old saying, "Please paint a mural on my wall" to you actually going to the school and making the arrangements and making it happen?

Matt Willey: There’s this thing that I always need on a project: They can’t happen without a champion, like, Paula Alexander was the champion on Burt’s Bees and Sanna’s mom, Nabeja, was the champion for the Janney mural. So, she could go and talk to the principal and find a wall and do a lot of the logistics of what needs to happen when I’m there. Where am I staying? Whom am I staying with? I almost always stay with people locally in the community. There’s just a lot of logistics and, so, yeah, her mom jumped onboard and that was how that project happened.

Jo Reed: What was the experience like painting bees on a school wall surrounded by kids?

Matt Willey: That ended up being a really experience for me. I don’t have much of a background with kids-- a little bit-- but I’ve had to start speaking to them and actually interacting! And I must have spoken to thirty class rooms on that project? And we had the mural was right at where they have recess. So, there was at any given moment two hundred kids behind me shouting to me, talking to me, asking questions-- it was so clear to me how much curiosity these murals inspire in these kids. It was nonstop. And then you engage them for six weeks doing this? They’ll never forget. They will never forget what they’ve learned about pollinators, because it wasn’t “One day this guy flew in and did this thing and left.” I was there every day when they came to school and, so, they got to watch it unfold. They were a part of the process. That happens on almost every project whether it's with adults or kids or just a general community. But the kids really get it. Like, they just--they bring a whole other level of stuff to it.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you this: How is it for you painting with people talking to you and being there with you as opposed to your previous 25 years’ worth of work where I’m assuming you pretty much were on your own.

Matt Willey: Mm-hm. I’m glad I had twenty-five years of having a paintbrush in my hand. I decided early on that the initiative was only going to serve if I actually engage with the people. I want there to be lots of questions and I want kids especially, but adults as well, ask them. We need to be talking about this stuff. So, I made a choice along the way to actually talk to every single person that spoke to me. And some people are shy and they won’t, but the beauty of it is I’m not facing them generally. I’m facing the wall. So, it’s this energy that I’m not intimidating. And people can just come up and hang out until they’re ready to engage.

Jo Reed: Did it break your concentration when kids-- or when any people would talk to you?

Matt Willey: You know, I shift to my complete focus on the wall and then I shift my complete focus to who I’m talking to. You know, I look at these and I need, like, one hour a day to myself to just really check in with how the work is going. And then I sort of know what I’m going to do. ‘Cause I design to some extent, but I do sketches and I often change things mid-way. And I tell everybody that ahead of time. The one thing with the kids-- I was surrounded by kids and I realized that from sun-up until sundown there are kids at this wall. Like, a lot of them. So, even on the weekends it’s in the city. So, that’s the playground to go play on the weekends. So, I wasn’t getting that hour a day where I could just check in with my design and really hone and, like, just, you know, go super focused and make any changes I needed. And there was this really interesting artistic and spiritual question I had to ask myself, " I can either answer this question of this little girl who’s talking to me right now or I can have a teacher make her go away and I can focus more on the art." You know, and it was a really interesting question to be faced. I’d never had to make a choice like that in my career. It was always about the art. And I made the choice to talk to that little girl in that moment, knowing that may come up again in life. You know, it’s not going to happen on every project. Usually I do get enough time by myself. But when you’re dealing with kids they’re a force of nature. And, you know, I really believe there is something to changing a generation of children’s minds about nature, about pollinators, about bees, about all of that. That will have a much bigger effect than that one mural.

Jo Reed: Yeah. You painted your largest mural I think in Lyons, Nebraska. Tell me about that project.

Matt Willey: Mm-hm. It wasn’t the largest mural, but it was the biggest bees.

Jo Reed: Ah!

Matt Willey: The bees are twenty-one feet and that project was fascinating because I’ve always for whatever reason-- I don’t even know why-- I’ve been fascinated by Nebraska. I’ve always wanted to go there. And I never had an opportunity to go there. And this guy, Jeff, emailed me and he had an eight-acre organic farm or a farm that he was treating as organic, but couldn't get his numbers to completely organic because he’s surrounded by big agriculture. So, thousands of acres around him-- he’s this little, tiny postage stamp in the middle of big agriculture. And I was fascinated by that. He just had said to me, “Well, why don’t you come up to this barn roof? You can see it from way down the road and why don’t you come and paint bees so the crop dusters can see them. You know, and just see there’s something down here that’s being sprayed that isn’t necessarily what you’re aiming at.” That was the instigation for the project and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I get to go to Lyons, Nebraska. This is so cool.” And, so, we went, me and my assistant at the time, Nick, and Cameron who was going to come and film. He’s a student, he’s working on the film with me. So, we got there and you know, we interviewed some farmers, we talked with some crop dusters-- they wouldn't let us film, but-- and I talked with organic farmers, other ones in the area and the Big Agriculture farmers. And in this whole process I’m learning. I’m following where the bees take me--

Jo Reed: Mm-hm.

Matt Willey: and I’m trying to learn. I’m not trying to judge. I’m not trying to do anything.

Jo Reed: Bees, nature in general, wasn’t something that drove you before you took this project on?

Matt Willey: Not at all. Like, literally not at all.

Jo Reed: That is really interesting. And how did they find the money to pay you in Nebraska?

Matt Willey: The costs were very low on that one. Jeff owns the little organic farm-- it’s where he’s hoping to retire, but he works in a hospital and he had a little get-together. He had a bunch of people from the hospital come and <laughs> and I showed my videos and told people about my work and we just took donations-- or people buy prints. It's very grassroots. I like the idea of the community coming together around it, whatever that community, whatever that community is. You know, whatever it is.

Jo Reed: Well, because then they have more of an investment in it. I mean, they have buy-in.

Matt Willey: Yeah. And they’re connected to the project and it will mean something more.

Jo Reed: Tell me about taking on a multi-year initiative that takes you all around the country and you hope all around the world. What have you learned as you have begun to embark on that?

Matt Willey Some days it feels really overwhelming, because I do big projects, right? So when I was, like, up on the scaffolding at one point and I’m on this Janney mural and I’m-- the kids are screaming in the background and I'm literally questioning everything “Should I be doing this? Who am I? What do I think?” And I looked down and this little girl is screaming, “Your bees are amazing! Thank you for painting bees on our wall! Your bees are amazing.” Like, that's what I get. I don't have to know more than that. I get to be of one of my favorite books, which is by Wassily Kandinsky or ‘Vassily’ Kandinsky, and it’s called Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it was written in 1911 and he talks about modern artists having social duties. You know, they’re the spiritual channels. That’s what he talked about. And he talks about for those teachings to have weight they must be comprehensible. You know, and I really connect with that, ‘cause murals are in a lot of ways the comprehensible version of art. They’re for the people. You can’t get around it. You’re putting it in a public place for people to see. It’s not in a collector’s room at their house, which nobody-- or whoever they choose-- gets to see it. It’s for everybody. So, it’s that energy about it that wasn’t my work before. I was in a lot of private settings, but I-- so this part is new to me for two and a half years going and painting outdoors a lot. You know, I did some in the past, but most of it was interior. And, so, being around the people that are in the community, it’s something magical happens when you just slowly reveal something that wasn’t there before.

Jo Reed: Well, Matt, thank you so much. Thank you for giving me your time. I really appreciate it.

Matt Willey: Thank you for having me. This was great.

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Jo Reed: That was artist, Matthew Willey. We were talking about his initiative called The Good of the Hive. You can find out all about it at thegoodofthehive.com. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. And the Art Works podcast is now available on iTunes, so please subscribe. And if you like us, leave us a rating. It really does help people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening!