Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Animation, Video, Film, Sculpture, Installation
Website: davidbayus.zone
David Bayus was born in 1982 in Johnson City, Tennessee, and lives and works in San Francisco. He received his BFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005 and his MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. Since 2019, he has served on the faculty of the Digital Media Art department at the CADRE Laboratory at San Jose State University, and previously held teaching positions at the San Francisco Art Institute and as a guest lecturer at Stanford University. He is a co-founder of BASEMENT, an art collective and screening space in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Bayus’s work has been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure, Telematic Media Arts, Bass & Reiner, and Et al. in the Bay Area, as well as at Vacancy in Los Angeles, Field Contemporary in Vancouver, and Material Art Fair in Mexico City. Editions of his work are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 2022, Bayus completed a residency at Recology San Francisco, a program that provides artists access to the city’s waste and recycling facilities as source material. The following year, he received a permanent public art commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for POLIS (2023), a single-channel video installation installed at 49 South Van Ness and accepted into the city’s Civic Art Collection in 2024.
Bayus works across 3D animation, sculpture, painting, and video installation, building fictional worlds in which characters navigate catastrophic change through repetitive gesture and accumulated ritual. His practice investigates how crisis transforms routine into performance—how compulsion calcifies into habit, how roles replace the people performing them. Drawing on the visual registers of science fiction, horror, and digital culture, his animated films combine hand-modeled 3D environments with sculptural props and painted elements, producing work that sits at the intersection of experimental cinema and gallery installation.
A recurring tension in Bayus’s work runs between scientific rationality and spiritual belief—between systems that promise order and the irrational forces that overwhelm them. His recent projects have turned toward domestic space, household labor, and gender performance, examining the intimate rituals through which identity is enacted daily. Across film, sculpture, and public commission, his work maintains a consistent interest in how environments—urban, domestic, virtual—shape the bodies and behaviors that inhabit them.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.