Davey Highben clears the chaos with ‘Future Salad Days’

In conceptualizing “Future Salad Days,” which kicks off with a free, daylong celebration at the downtown gallery Blockfort on Friday, July 4, artist Davey Highben traveled backwards through time.

First, it’s 1991 and Highben is a 17-year-old visiting Dodge Skate Park, where he meets Martin Blenkinsopp, a fellow skater and artist who will grow to become a friend of three-plus decades and a creative foil, the two collaborating under the banner Blenkm Highben. 

Then it’s 1983, and Highben, a sheltered 9-year-old kid living in Massillon, Ohio, is sneaking away from his parents’ house to attend a weekend party held on an asphalt lot tucked away in the woods near the high school. There, he’ll watch skaters grind on trucked in, homemade ramps adjacent to a stream of unrehearsed, gloriously ragged punk bands. 

Finally, it’s 1979, and a 5-year-old Highben rides his dirt bike around his uncle’s 110-acre farm in Stark County, Ohio, during Cotton’s Corn County Festival. Held at harvest time, the annual celebration is populated by a colorful array of bikers, burnouts, and their similarly rough-and-tumble offspring.

With the kickoff of “Future Salad Days,” Highben hopes to capture the excitement, the clash of cultures, and the sense of kinship he experienced collectively in these moments, the event snowballing into a carnival-like affair complete with food trucks, a skate jam, and musical performances from Juanita & Juan (featuring Alice Bag and Kid Congo Powers), Clickbait, Cheater Slicks, The Whiteouts, NOX, Uncle Blender, Pagan Car Bomb, Red Velvet Letdown, Miracle Violence Connection, and Midwest Kazoo Core. (The accompanying group exhibition, for which Highben converted Blockfort into an ad hoc skate shop, will remain on display throughout July.)

“Nobody was trying to do anything. Nobody was trying to make money. It was just camaraderie and satisfaction and self-expression,” Highben said of these formative events. “And it was there that I got these early ideas that chased me into playing music, chased me into making art. … And [with this show] I was like, ‘I’m gonna recreate what it’s like to be a 14-year-old, 15-year-old kid walking into a skate shop somewhere between ’86 and ’92.’ Or maybe it’s not even a skate shop. Maybe it’s the old, subterranean Used Kids record store, or a weird comic book shop like Eide’s in Pittsburgh, where you walk and you’re bombarded by all the stimuli that’s overwhelming and fantastic and foreign and strange, but also somewhat familiar and reassuring. And maybe you don’t know what it is. And you don’t know what it means. But you want to dive in and figure it out.”

Highben said he first began to consider this show three years ago, embracing it as a chance to celebrate these decades-spanning “wonder years,” as he described them, and in particular the time he logged skating alongside Blenkinsopp and Donnie Humes as a teenager. “Every good decision, every bad decision, and everything I was inspired by came from that brief moment in time at Dodge Skate Park in Columbus, Ohio,” said Highben, who created nearly 50 skate decks for the exhibition, pulling from the work he and Blenkinsopp created together over the years and then painting, collaging, and otherwise scrawling designs onto each board. “I’m paying homage to 17-year-old Davey, who decided it was okay to be weird. … And I also wanted to pay respects to skateboarding, which has been the steadiest relationship in my life, the best therapy.”

Pulling up to Dodge these days, the artist said, decades of memories will immediately flood his mind and then disappear the instant as he pushes off. “Then I’m just free,” he said. “Because you’re just reacting. Everything [with skateboarding] is based on feeling.”

For years, Highben has approached his art in a similar manner, working on intuition as he trades pieces back and forth with Blenkinsopp, each painting over the other’s work, alternating between taking control and then abdicating it. At the same time, Highben has a vision and a work ethic that can border on maniacal, each of his exhibitions in some way serving as an endurance test to see how far he can push not only the work, but himself. In the final push to complete his contributions to “Future Salad Days,” for instance, Highben quit the 9-to-5 job he’d held for more than a year, conceding that there weren’t enough hours in the day for both and siding with the art in spite of the high personal costs involved. 

In some ways, “Future Salad Days” serves as the rosier hued flipside to “Never Beg for a Seat When You Can Create Your Own Table,” an exhibition Highben staged at his home on Parson Avenue in October 2023. While that show built on a similarly backwards look, the artist then took a more jaundiced view of the past, wrangling with the sense of shame he said he felt as a teenager toward his multiple sclerosis-afflicted mother and dwelling on growing concerns that his pursuit of the arts had left him ill-prepared for life as an adult. “I have to make sense of the 20 years I quote-unquote ‘wasted’ just playing music, not saving money, not investing, not preparing for any kind of future,” he said at the time, repeatedly expressing his belief that the exhibition would also be a failure, bringing these ideas full circle.

This time around, Highben has adopted a different outlook, one invariably shaped by the comparatively positive memories he associates with the various events that led him to this exhibition and by extension this moment in time.

“I should probably stop saying this, because I sound like a broken record, but this show is nothing like I envisioned. I mean, I’m hitting all the marks. The theme is there. I’ve done everything that I wanted to do and say, per se, but it’s very different. And I’m happy about that this time. And it’s not failure,” he said. “This is something else. And as hard as it’s been the last two years to jump over the hurdles to get to the finish line, it’s not a sense of relief. It’s a sense of awe and wonder and knowing what can really be accomplished once I clear the chaos.”