David Black (born May 29, 1928) is an American sculptor known for both, his pioneering, avant-garde use of plastics and his monumental, aluminum, large scale public sculptures.
Early life and artistic career
David Black was born in 1928 on the island of Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose ocean seascape, rough granite shoreline and iconic white lighthouses, white oceanside hotels, white churches and ships were to dominate his work his entire career. He later revealed that a near death experience as a very young child where he was not expected to live after falling from a tree, was a driving force in his lifelong obsession with archaic, spiritual forms and architecture.
He left Cape Ann in 1946 to study science at Wesleyan University. During the summers he returned to work as a lifeguard on Gloucester's Wingaersheek Beach where he met sculptor George Aarons, who had a studio in the sand dunes nearby. The experience made such an impression, that two years into college, he changed his major to art, embarking on a career as a sculptor. The summer of 1949 Black attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which solidified his choice to pursue art.
For the first 12 years, he made exclusively ceramic pottery and sculptures, winning the First Prize for Ceramics at the American Crafts Museum in New York in 1957. Later he received fellowships that took him to other countries and ancient cultures. A Fulbright fellowship grant in 1962 allowed him to live a year and a half in Florence, Italy, investigating ancient Etruscan art, making sculptures(in the former studio of Leonardo da Vinci) and having them cast in bronze in nearby Pistoia.
While further investigating the monumental structures, this time of ancient Meso-America, he set up a temporary studio in Mexico in 1966, casting in aluminum and designing wall-hangings to be woven in wool by local, Indigenous weavers.
Black's first breakthrough came with his pioneering, avant-garde use of plastic as a complete and significant art form with his “receptors of light”. Naum Gabo had previously investigated transparency through glass a half century before and a few artists had used plastics inadvertently, but Black is widely credited as being the first to use the commonplace, industrial material to its full potential in “fully imaginative forms”, a “pure plastic esthetic” building his own vacu-form machines to mold and shape sheets of Plexiglas, later through the lamination of layers of Plexiglas with epoxy resin, which added the quality of refracted light, and lastly, in his transparent Black Edge Series.
In 1970, he received the two-year Artist in Residence grant from DAAD, the German Academic Exchange, to live in then West-Berlin, Germany. There, the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), commissioned the monumental sculpture, Skypiece, for its courtyard fountain and held an exhibition of his sculpture at the Amerika Haus, Berlin. He returned again in 1977 for a one-man-exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie. This exhibition was shown as well at the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany.
Returning to the United States, Black received an “Individual Artist Grant” from the National Endowment of the Arts while being awarded a full professorship at the Ohio State University. It was at this time, around 1980, that he began producing monumental, abstract public sculpture, working again in metal, this time with massive plates of industrial aluminum.
Public sculpture
More than 40 major sculptures, most the result of winning open competitions, are installed throughout the US, as well as in Germany, Japan and Canada. Black describes his work as “proto-architecture,” a reference to his fusion of archetypal architectural motifs, such as columns, pillars, arches, and the use of light with the energy and references of sculpture. His community landmarks engage their environments and the viewer spatially, as well as culturally, strongly connecting with the viewer as they move through and around the work.
THE SACRED: In spite of an early, successful, lucrative relationship with private art galleries, particularly with the sale of his woven wool tapestries, he came to increasingly disassociate from commercial art galleries in particular and lament the commercialization of art in general, choosing instead to work almost exclusively in the public realm, preferring to regard art, not as a commodity, but as an expression of the sacred.