Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Drawing, installation, performance
Website: davidwilsonandribbons.com
David Wilson was born in 1982 in Framingham, Massachusetts, and earned a BA in Visual Art from Wesleyan University in 2005. He now lives and works in Oakland, California, where his practice grew out of long periods of plein air study in Bay Area canyons, groves, and coastlines. In the years since, he has built a body of work that moves between large-scale observational drawing and the orchestration of temporary, collaborative gatherings that bring together artists, musicians, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans in the landscapes he studies.
Wilson received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Art Award in 2012, one of four Bay Area artists honored that year, and used the accompanying commission to create Arrivals, a set of self-guided journeys to outdoor sites around San Francisco anchored by a sixteen-foot-high ink drawing installed in a Presidio eucalyptus grove. In 2014 he served as guest curator, alongside BAMPFA director Lawrence Rinder, of The Possible, an exhibition that turned the museum’s galleries into a working studio, dye lab, print shop, and recording space for nearly one hundred Bay Area artists and makers; the City of Berkeley subsequently designated May 25 as “The Possible Day” in recognition of the project. He was BAMPFA’s guest artist for close to a decade (through roughly 2018) and has received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Center for Craft Creativity and Design, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, and Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant. In 2018 the San Francisco Arts Commission selected him for a permanent public art commission at San Francisco International Airport.
Wilson’s core practice is observational drawing done on-site, often at monumental scale, using sumi ink, watercolor, charcoal pencil, and gouache on found or gridded archival paper, frequently housed in frames he builds himself. His subjects are specific places — a canyon, a rock formation, a stretch of coastline — rendered through extended, meditative sessions of direct looking rather than photography or memory.
Around these drawings he builds a second, more ephemeral practice: unsanctioned and invited gatherings in Bay Area woods, beaches, and museum galleries that combine temporary architecture, music, film, stop-motion animation, and communal cooking. The two strands are linked by the same premise — that sustained attention to a place, shared with a community of collaborators, is itself the artwork — which has led him as often into curating and event-organizing as into drawing.
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