From NFTs to kinetic installations, Charleston’s Mike Winkelmann is pushing the boundaries of digital art
Driving along Clements Ferry Road toward Beeple Studios is your first clue that you’re about to enter an alternate universe. The corridor stretching from the back side of Daniel Island toward Cainhoy and Highway 41 still has a few remnant marine repair shops and mom-and-pop operations, but today it’s largely industrial. Turn onto Charleston Regional Parkway toward the studio, and massive concrete-block buildings dominate the landscape—storage facilities, humongous distribution centers for Sam’s Club and Lowe’s, a FedEx hub. Hulking, boxy buildings with no windows, no personality—the underside of hulking consumerism. The environs feel worlds away from, say, the Gibbes Museum of Art’s Beaux Arts grandeur and exude little creative vibe. But don’t be fooled, this warehouse-heavy realm is where some of the buzziest work in the art world is being made.
As you wind back toward what GPS assures you is Beeple Studios, despite no signage to confirm, and enter a smaller-scale (but still 50,000-square-foot) building, the landscape suddenly transforms. Bright colors, animated videos, and intriguingly odd images flash across screens. Massive prints of Beeple’s digital art, ie large heads and contorted figures doing largely indescribable things, parade down hallways until you pass through big industrial doors into a vast gallery. And here, the Beeple universe, the world of Mike Winkelmann—a computer science nerd turned outrageously successful, globally famous digital artist—begins to come into focus. White gallery walls frame a 13,000-square-foot space with cement floors and exposed industrial ceilings, with smaller side galleries displaying the evolution of Winkelmann, from programming geek to one of the top-earning living artists in the digital realm, and actually, in any realm.
“This is the first piece we sold at Christie’s in November 2021,” he says, swiping one hand through his boyish buzzed-cut, flat-top hair as the other points to the centerpiece, HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic “sculpture” that Swiss entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ryan Zurrer bought for $28.9 million. Across four screens, an astronaut-ish figure endlessly marches and morphs through shifting landscapes in a revolving rectangular cube. Don’t worry: it’s okay if that’s hard to envision. Beeple’s work is equally hard to describe and grasp. It doesn’t fit into any rubrics you might remember from Art History 101, which, he explains, is the whole point. “From my earliest days making weird little art things and abstract computer videos, I’ve always only been trying to make something I’ve never seen before. That’s still the case,” says Winkelmann, the 44-year-old’s Midwest accent still distinct despite nearly a decade living in the Lowcountry.
The artist, now popularly known as “Beeple,” started out as a regular guy named Mike who grew up in the eastern Wisconsin town of North Fond du Lac, population just shy of 5,000, on the tail end of Lake Winnebago. His father was an electrical engineer; his mother ran the town’s senior center. “Art was not a thing in our household. Nobody gave a crap about art, like, in that total area. The closest art museum was in Milwaukee, but it played no part,” he says. That lack of art exposure continued through his adult years—when Beeple had his first solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery in Manhattan in 2022, Winkelmann confessed that he’d never been to a gallery opening.
He did, however, get early exposure to the world of computers. “I was in the fourth grade when we got our first one, the 386 PC, with a 40 MB hard drive. This was way pre-Internet. There wasn’t a lot you could do with it,” Winkelmann says. Still, at age 12, he was fascinated. His dad taught him some rudimentary programming, and he tinkered and played video games, as young boys with new toys do. He decided he’d go to school to learn how to make video games and eventually graduated from Purdue University with a degree in computer science. “But I very quickly realized I was spending all my time making little abstract films and weird shit, not video games,” says Winkelmann, who tosses f-bombs so generously he might more aptly go by “Bleeple.” “I got the degree as a backup but put all my real time and energy into making my own sort of digital art. Even though there was no market for it,” he says.
After graduating in 2003, he worked as a web designer to pay the bills but continued experimenting and creating. Meanwhile, digital tools were evolving. In the early days, he says, “I didn’t even have a camera, just the web camera on my computer, so I could only shoot within the parameter that the cord could reach.” Still, he stretched. And his imagination kept stretching, too, thanks in part to a friend who was finding “all sorts of weird, really cool experimental music videos and stuff coming out of the UK,” says Winkelmann, who was inspired by the “new tones, new aesthetics, new themes. I have no idea how this guy from my same small town and a family like mine that didn’t give a [bleep] about art was finding this. It was so insanely ahead of its time.”
Winkelmann, decked in a standard collared shirt, occasionally a half-zip sweater, dark pants, and slightly hip brown shoes—semi-rumpled, not at all flashy—has always been ahead of his time. By 2014, he’d developed enough freelance work to quit his web-design job and began cranking out digital imagery and motion graphics for an impressive roster of clients, including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Louis Vuitton, and Nike. His visuals appeared in two Super Bowl halftime shows. This high-end work and notoriety came to him largely thanks to his ongoing practice of making Everydays, which he began on May 1, 2007, when he committed to creating and posting one new image a day, to “improve my drawing and 3-D modeling skills.” With the regular postings, his social media following grew (now topping two million on Instagram), and the practice was paying off. Buoyed by his successful freelance career, Winkelmann and his wife Jen, a teacher, decided to leave the Wisconsin cold in 2017 and move to Charleston, where his younger brother Scott, now a partner in running Beeple Studios, was an engineer at Boeing.
A gigantic collage of Everydays stretches along what appears to be a football field-sized gallery wall at Beeple Studios—an homage to the groundbreaking NFT that sold for a staggering $69 million to Singapore-based blockchain entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan in March 2021, just four months after Winkelmann learned what a nonfungible token was. If you’re still unsure what that means, you’re in good company: it’s basically how the cryptocurrency world uses blockchain technology to identify and authenticate a unique piece of art, enabling the transfer of its ownership. “I realized that as one of the most popular digital artists, people were waiting for me to come to the NFT space to validate it. Maybe this is the start of digital art finally being respected as a ‘real’ art form,” he says.
Since then, the crypto landscape has further evolved, and the NFT heyday has crested, but Beeple was very much in the right place at the right time. That historic sale generated headlines around the world, landing Winkelmann on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and prompted a New Yorker feature titled “How Beeple Broke the Art World.”
Many in the traditional art world still question the value of digital art and ruffle at Beeple’s big break. His art hardly has the mass aesthetic appeal of a Matisse or Gauguin. His images are often grotesque and garish, a mix of sci-fi surrealism, dark dystopian humor, and biting political commentary. At last December’s Art Basel Miami Beach, Winkelmann stole the show with Regular Animals, a kennel of robotic dogs with lifelike heads of tech billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, plus Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Beeple himself that walked about pooping out mini-Instamatic photos. Instagram was flooded with reposts of the dog-pen clips, meanwhile critics had a field, or rather, dog-park day.
“In a year steeped in fears about AI, automation, and the creeping power of the platforms that shape our reality, Beeple has seemingly produced a pressure valve for that cultural anxiety,” wrote ARTnews. Winkelmann reposted a video from a critic deriding his work as “robotic monuments to masculinity, power, ego, late-stage tech capitalist cosplay…that lands as ick.” It was “not serious art,” she added, deriding the fact that in lieu of traditional gallery representation, “Beeple represented himself at Art Basel…it’s a structural shift that feels really dangerous.” In response, Winkelmann beamed, “There is literally no higher compliment than saying my work is not art. Every piece of art that has stood the test of time was at first seen as not art.” Witness Banksy, he says, or Charleston native Shepard Fairey, who was a featured collaborator at Beeple Studios in March.
For former Gibbes Museum of Art director Angela Mack, having a maverick like Beeple “here in our backyard” made reaching out to him a no-brainer. “How could we not approach it?” says Mack, who invited Beeple to exhibit three kinetic sculptures at the Gibbes from December 2024 through April 2025. While she anticipated some pushback from members, “it was so far out there that people didn’t resist,” says the now-retired Mack. “I’m 73, and I find this work super exciting,” she adds.
She recalls being “totally blown away” when she first visited Beeple Studios to get a clearer sense of what Winkelmann was up to. “It really felt like a Renaissance studio, just mind-boggling, to see his vision and where he was going,” she says. “His work ethic is unbelievable, as Everydays demonstrates. And the work he showed at the Gibbes was at a whole new level, both the aesthetic and the technology. He just stretches it every chance he gets.”
Mack also appreciates that Winkelmann recognizes how digital art can present challenges for traditional museums. In 2024, Beeple Studios hosted a gathering of museum professionals from around the country to help demystify both the art form and the ways museums can engage with it. “He understands that people have to be nurtured in this process, and he takes the time to do that,” adds Mack, who has attended a few studio events. “The crowds are astounding,” she notes. “I really hope it creates innovation in our community and embeds it in our creative process.”
That’s Winkelmann’s hope as well and central to his purpose in creating Beeple Studios, which, since opening in 2023, has hosted 18 events in its 13,000-square-foot, screen-surround “experimental space,” including a SCAD student showcase, a couple “CryptoPunks” meetups, and multiple community nights. “I’m trying to bring together people with different mediums and different backgrounds but a shared love of art and connect those pieces,” says Winkelmann, a father of two. His parents, who are now also living here, often help direct traffic or troubleshoot during events. “We like offering opportunities to participate and give people an outlet to be creative themselves during events, and hopefully, they go home thinking, ‘Hey, I’ve never been to an event like that,’ and that it’s something that can only happen here,” he says.
When Danny McBride and Brandon James of McBride’s Rough House Pictures reached out to explore a collaboration, Winkelmann was all in. The idea arose after McBride and James attended Beeple Studio’s grand opening, and like Mack, were “blown away by what he’d built out there,” says James, who recalls being surrounded by folks from “London, Sweden, Germany, all over—it felt like LA, not somewhere off Clements Ferry Road.”
Over a follow-up beer, they began talking about how AI was changing art, and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do an art show that incorporated AI as an experiment, but also infused some fun?” says James. In October 2025, Rough House Pictures and Beeple Studios presented “Synthetic Theatre,” two immersive evenings “where artificial intelligence, generative art, and performative spectacle intersected in real time…pushing the boundaries of what it means to cocreate with machines, offering an experience equal parts experimental lab and digital dreamscape,” according to the Beeple Studios website. And McBride and James can’t wait to collaborate again. “Mike is incredibly adventurous and generous, and he’s got a bunch of cool toys,” says James of the tricked-out, high-tech studio. “It takes a village, so why not join forces with other cool people around town?”
Winkelmann, with his f-bombs, hair flips, and NFT-fueled fame, is totally down for that. In many ways, he remains the everyday guy from small-town Wisconsin, who still doesn’t care much about traditional art (“the walls at our house are pretty boring,” he admits). He’s just happy creating weird art. “Our only goal is to make things that are interesting and new. This is a studio, not a business,” he says. “We want to make work that pushes people forward in their idea of what art can be.” If the perpetual-motion astronaut dude in HUMAN ONE could talk, he’d likely say, “Mission accomplished.”
Learn more about Beeple Studios and upcoming events: www.beeple-studios.xyz
