Levi Bent is a multidisciplinary artist from the Okanogan Valley who grew up on an Indian reservation in Washington state. He started creating art at a young age and his style is characterized by humor and caricature. Despite growing up in a small town on the reservation and struggling with addiction, Bent found resilience and reinvented himself through learning his language and culture, as well as through his art and skateboarding.

“No one decides to become homeless and addicted. These people are fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and our children. This is a mental health issue, not a criminal one, and has nothing to do with morality. I just watched a documentary on the drug crisis. Twice as many people have died of drug overdoses during the Covid pandemic, then all the people who have died from Covid. This gave me a sense of the scale of the drug crisis we are facing all over the world. I felt compelled to paint not just my story, but that of all the other’s struggling with the never ending cycle of addiction.”