David Driskell

Driskell was born in 1931 in Eatonton, Georgia. The son of a Baptist minister, Driskell attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. (Bachelor of fine Arts degree, 1955). Premier art historian James A. Porter, author Modern Negro Art (1943), taught there, as did the highly respected painter Lois Mailou Jones.  Porter had a profound influence on Driskell, convincing him of his gift for teaching.  Thus began an ascent, which has included the chairmanship of the Fisk University and University of Maryland art departments, authorship of over 25 books, a British Broadcasting Company-produced documentary on African-American art, several curatorial milestones, including the acclaimed “Two Centuries of Black American Art” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, as well as the Drs. William H. and Camille Cosby collection for which he also serves as the curator.

Through it all, Driskell continued to make art.  By 1962, when he earned his Master of fine Arts degree from the Catholic University of America, he had received thorough formal training as well as guidance through his close association with the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts.  Founded in the 1950s by Leon Berkowitz, this center attracted such art world luminaries as Clement Greenberg, Willem de Kooning, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland.  In resistance to the way color was being used in the exaggerated canvases of action painters such as Jackson Pollock, Louis and Noland explored using color as content, rendered in a subtler manner.  Driskell studies with them but made some changes in their concept.  By building up colors in egg tempera and encaustic medium, he recreated the luminosity of sun-drenched Georgia, his strongest idiom.

Driskell art has been exhibited and is collected by major institutions such as: The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Reginald Lewis Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Conference of Artists in Detroit.   Driskell actively exhibits throughout America.  He is the consummate Painter, for he is always involved with his environment to transfer new influences and stimuli to his art and therefore our lives.  For Driskell’s art captures the richness and vitality of contemporary life in all its iterations of beauty.