David Driskell: Icon
This exhibition features a diverse selection of David Driskell’s works in various media created over the past four decades. All themes typical of the late, great, internationally renowned and dearly loved artist’s oeuvre are represented.
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 5, 2021, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
David Driskell (1931-2020) earned his widely held reputation as a foremost authority on African American Art by committing his long life, his luminous intellect, and his enormous talent and energy as an artist, scholar, and curator to the cause. A recipient of thirteen honorary doctorates, Dr. Driskell’s contributions to scholarship in the history of American art and, importantly, Black artists’ role within it, are significant. His impact, perhaps, beyond measure. As an educator, curator, and art advisor to important public and private collections, including those of Oprah Winfrey and President and Mrs. Clinton, Driskell nurtured and promoted the careers and legacies of many other other Black artists. In all of his roles, David worked tirelessly throughout his career to demonstrate the truth of his conviction that “African American art is American art,” its inclusion crucial to a complete understanding of the canon.
Photo by Frank Stewart
Born in 1931 in Eatonton, Georgia, Driskell was educated at Howard University, and later earned a Master of Fine Arts from The Catholic University Of America. In 1953, Dr. Driskell attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During his residency, he fell in love with the state of Maine and, in 1961, he and his wife Thelma bought a plot of land in Falmouth. There David designed and built his own studio, returning every summer to paint, to garden, and to entertain his many, many friends, old and new, with his warm hospitality and delightful storytelling. Dr. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1997, he was awarded the President’s Medal, which is the highest honor the University bestows on a member of its faculty. In 1998, the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora was established to promote and preserve Driskell’s scholarship and to honor his service to the University. In December of 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Driskell the National Humanities Medal. In 2004, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta established its annual David C. Driskell Prize, which was first awarded in 2005. Its distinguished recipients include First Lady Michele Obama’s official portraitist, Amy Sherald. In 2018. Dr .Driskell was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
When the indomitable human spirit rises above the chaos of violence, hunger and pain and soars to a heightened relief through the making of art, we are classless and raceless so long as we create the spiritual vision. As an artist of African ancestry, I have had to learn to live with racism, sexism and all of the prejudices. I often find refuge and, indeed, solace in the creative process. In the quiet of my small studio nestled in the majestic pines and white birches in Maine, two worlds merge in my work, one of sight, the other of vision. The beauty of nature and the creative world of the imaginations together express the joyous vision I have as an artist, responding to the spiritual urge within to fulfill my earthly task of making and creating my own beautiful world.
— David Driskell
As an artist, David Driskell worked primarily in collage and mixed media. His paintings and prints have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Portland Museum of Art, where a phenomenal traveling retrospective entitled David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History is on display through September 12, 2021. Learn more about this important exhibition HERE. During his lifetime, Dr. Driskell was the recipient of many foundation fellowships, among which are the Harmon Foundation, three Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and the Danforth Foundation Fellowship.
Driskell’s large and vibrant body of work is informed and impacted by the broad perspective of his own life experience as well as by his unique personal identity. He was the child of sharecroppers, born into the segregated South, but also a celebrated international artist and scholar. He was both an urbane denizen of our nation’s capital and a sophisticated world traveler with a deep connection to, and understanding of, the art of Africa and other world cultures. But just as importantly, he was the designer, creator, and loving tender of his own rather Edenic Falmouth, Maine gardens. Driskell -- an artist very much concerned with the artist’s quasi-religious role as a “seer” and forthbringer of new forms -- created vivid, imaginative art that is equal parts Americana and Africana in his hand-hewn rural idyll, which is itself a form brought forth from Driskell’s rich, fertile, and prolific imagination.
David cites the strongest influences on his work as: 1) Environment -- the natural world, but also “home,” both as a physical space and as a concept. The artist saw a type of “spirit” in the objects he depicts, and the spirit that animates these mundane subjects (furniture, etc.) becomes visible in his finished work); 2) Upbringing - David’s father was a Baptist minister, and many of Driskell’s works are highly stylized, uniquely personal expressions of Biblical themes, or contain motifs from the Judeo-Christian tradition; 3) “My intellectual pursuit of learning from the great civilizations of the world” – we see evidence of this influence through his incorporation of elements of Africana (masks, textile motifs, etc.) and other world cultures (including American, via spirituals, gospel, jazz and blues); and 4) Memory and Imagination.
In Driskell’s work, all of these source energies converge to form a voice complementary to, but unique and distinct from, other important African-American artists of the past and the present. Signatures of his style include rich, vivid color, rhythm, and line (as pictoral element), recurring motifs, and a spirit of constant invention and re-invention. Much of David’s work contains strong decorative elements: calligraphy, African textile motifs, the patterned imagery of folk art, etc., but Driskell never replicates existing patterns. In viewing his work, we see that David has created his own individualized, and fascinating, aesthetic language.
To learn even more about Driskell’s enormous and ongoing impact and legacy, be sure to check out the HBO documentary Black Art: In The Absence Of Light. The film is Inspired by Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Two Centuries of Black American Art” and offers an illuminating introduction to the work of some of the most prominent Black visual artists working today. Learn more about the documentary HERE.
And to view additional Driskell work in Greenhut’s inventory, click HERE.
