David McConnell was a southern Californian musician, formerly known for his involvement as collaborator, producer and engineer for Elliott Smith's final album, From a Basement on the Hill as well as his involvement with the Summer Hymns and Folk Implosion/ Lou Barlow of Dinosaur JR.. Since 2004 he has become noted in the contemporary art world as a musician, composer and producer who uses his past experience in music culture as a vocabulary in his visual and installation based art work.
David McConnell's paintings and installations balance representation and abstraction, peppered with references to the 20th-century art avant-garde, religious iconography and symbolic imagery of his musical background as a producer and composer. In 2011, he started to translate his production techniques of sound into his visual work by painting sound waves for music either composed by himself or written by artists as varied as Handel to Neil young. In addition McConnell expanded the visual vocabulary by "sampling" the work of previous visual artists in new visual contexts in his canvases. His work has veered toward social motives in 2014 with direct references to responsible food practices, land use and consumer ideology associated with his solo exhibition "Frontier Thesis" at Flanders Gallery in Raleigh, NC.
After the birth of his son in 2010 McConnell began a quest to understand more about food culture, healthy eating/ cooking and responsible consumer practices related to food. This research led to a largely “corporate-free” sustainably farmed and foraged diet for his son and himself and also provided inspiration for imagery that has worked its way into his video and two-dimensional work. In addition, he has included elements such as wood and fabrics into his mixed media canvases as polarized expression of the hand made format. McConnell's installation work has been the focus of his public exposure as an artist, experienced by over one million viewers, in addition to his numerous sound recordings and film compositions.
McConnell began his career as a songwriter and record producer in Los Angeles where he made music for labels such as Virgin Records and DreamWorks but the industry apparently deemed his work too experimental or avant-garde to be commercially successful. McConnell exited the commercial music world and entered the visual art world after leaving his native California in 2004.
McConnell's work has been discussed or featured in publications such as Spin Magazine, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Bay Guardian and on NPR. In 2012 McConnell won the North Carolina Artist Fellowship Award. His work has been exhibited at notable private galleries around the US and major Museums such as the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Institute of Contemporary art Boston, The Miami Art MuseumThe Henry Gallery at The University of Washington, Seattle and The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh.
In August 2014 McConnell presented "Frontier Thesis" at Flanders Gallery in Raleigh, NC as his most ambitious public presentation of work to date. The exhibition, largely based on over two years of research into American History, its iconography and its relation to lost or misunderstood cultural tradition presents a unique perspective into the current digital era of abbreviated social interaction and consumer practices.
Opened in 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is a museum in Dallas, Texas, that houses the Patsy and Raymond Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. It is located on a 2.4-acre (9,700 m2) site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the Dallas Arts District.
Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, sound art as a practice "harnesses, describes, analyzes, performs, and interrogates the condition of sound and the process by which it operates."
Will Cotton is an American painter. His work primarily features landscapes composed of sweets, often inhabited by human subjects. Will Cotton lives and works in New York City.
Kristine Stiles is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University. She received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1994, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, both at Duke University. Among other fellowships and awards include a J. William Fulbright Fellowship in 1995, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, England in 2005.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
Fred Wilson is an American artist and describes himself as of "African, Native American, European and Amerindian" descent. He received a BFA from Purchase College, State University of New York. Wilson challenges colonial assumptions on history, culture, and race – encouraging viewers to consider the social and historical narratives that represent the western canon. Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2003. Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo in 1992 and the Venice Biennale in 2003. In May 2008, it was announced that Wilson would become a Whitney Museum trustee replacing Chuck Close.
David Hammons is an American artist, best known for his works in and around New York City and Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s.
Joshua Neustein is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in New York City. He is known for his Conceptual Art, environmental installations, Land Art, Postminimalist torn paper works, epistemic abstraction, deconstructed canvas works, and large-scale map paintings.
Irwin Kremen was an American artist who began making art while Director of the Duke University Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology, when he was 41, after earning a PhD six years earlier in clinical psychology at Harvard University.
Dario Robleto is an American transdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and teacher. His research-driven practice results in intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his exploration of music, popular culture, science, war, and American history.
Stephen Lapthisophon is an American artist, writer, and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies.
Fatimah Tuggar is a interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology. She is currently an associate professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the University of Florida in the United States.
The Nasher Museum of Art is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States.
Pedro Lasch is a visual artist born in Mexico City, and based in the U.S. since 1994. He produces works of conceptual art, institutional critique, social practice, and site-specific art, as well as paintings, photographs, prints, and works in traditional media.
Burk Uzzle is an American photojournalist, previously member of Magnum Photos and president from 1979 to 1980.
Beverly McIver is a contemporary artist, mostly known for her self-portraits, who was born and raised in Greensboro, NC. She is currently the Esbenshade Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University.
Hajra Waheed is a Montréal-based artist. Her multimedia practice includes works on paper, collage, sound, video, sculpture and installation. Waheed uses news accounts, extensive research and personal histories to critically examine multiple issues including: covert power, mass surveillance, cultural distortion and the traumas of displacement caused by colonialism and mass migration.
Radcliffe Bailey was an American contemporary visual artist noted for mixed-media, paint, and sculpture works that explore African-American history. He was based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a contemporary American artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography and film.
Vicki Meek is an American visual artist, and Black community leader in Dallas.
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