Coffee & Conversation with David Dann
Please join us at the DVAA Alliance Gallery, this Saturday for Coffee & Conversation with David Dann.
Saturday, July 30th at 10:30 am. Coffee & Treats will be provided.
This exhibition will be the first public display of David Dann’s work. Working as a commercial artist for the past 30 years, he has been quietly making art as a way of investigating the meaning of existence. Dann’s objective has been to create pieces that are readily accessible to viewers, engaging on a personal level, and easily acquired while occupying a curious space between artwork and commodity.
His artworks occupy a space that is a sometimes satirical and sometimes serious exploration of the meaning of our existence, a kind of philosophical examination in two and three dimensions of our role in the cosmos. Yes, Dann admits, it is a ‘grand conceit,’ but art to him seems particularly suited to that effort because it embodies both the rational and irrational. Its elements are concrete and intuited, at once known and unknowable. In that sense, art is the ideal analog for exploring the human condition.
After receiving a BFA from Cornell University and an MFA from the University of Chicago in the 1970s, David Dann moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. Rather than exhibit his work in conventional galleries, he created small pieces in multiple editions to sell in artist-run stores and museum shops. A number of those pieces were acquired for the permanent collections of the New Museum and the Franklin Furnace in New York, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Dann was also working as a commercial artist at the time, producing action figure prototypes for Hasbro and Kenner, sculpting models for National Geographic, Marvel Comics, Visa and MasterCard, and building dinosaur replicas for permanent exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago. In later years, after concluding his career as a fine artist, he was the designer of numerous award-winning publications, a live radio producer, and most recently, the author of a musical biography that was selected as one of Rolling Stone magazine’s Best Books of 2019.
Now retired, David Dann lives in Sullivan County, NY, and is currently working on a book of short stories based on his early days as an artist.
Acknowledgment
The activities of the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance are made possible in part by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
