David Brody’s “Road Paint Room #1”
The Art Lecture Series takes place in Lecture Hall 1 at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, on 4-5 Wednesdays per quarter, from 11:30-1:00 pm. Free to the public, Evergreen’s visual arts programs offer an opportunity to hear local, national and international interdisciplinary artists, writers and art workers speak about their work. For more information, contact Faculty Member Shaw Osha.
Kicking off this term’s Artist Lecture Series is David Brody who speaks Wednesday, October 9.
David Brody was born in New York City, did undergraduate work at Columbia University and Bennington College, and received an MFA in painting from Yale University (1983). In addition to solo exhibitions at Gallery NAGA in Boston, Esther Claypool Gallery in Seattle, Gescheidle in Chicago, and Galeria Gilde in Portugal his work has been featured in over seventy group shows including ones at the Chicago Center for the Print; the Center on Contemporary Art (COCA) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle; The Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Florida, Tallahassee; and at The Painting Center, Alternative Museum, and Bridgewater Gallery in New York City. His work has also been shown at the Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporàneo (ARCO Art Fair) in Madrid, the RipArte Art Fair in Rome, the Trevi Flash Art Museum, in Trevi, Italy, the FAC Art Fair in Lisbon and at Art Chicago in the US. He is represented in Seattle by Prographica, Fine Works on Paper.
His work is the subject of two monographs, “David Brody, Selected Painting 1985-1994? and “David Brody, Selected Painting 2000-2001?. The latter features an essay by Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York. An exhibit at the Esther Claypool Gallery in Seattle was described by the Seattle Weekly as, “daring, humorous, and superbly executed”; in Artforum they wrote: “Brody’s . . .paintings . . . provide a stunning visual punch . . . [and] are rendered with a bravura that is both compelling and hypnotic.”; and, Sue Taylor, wrote in Art in America, “A highly intelligent artist . . . Brody is absolutely serious about technique. An emphasis on fine drawing, delicate surfaces and careful considerations of color and light informs all his pictures.” Brody has been written about in many other publications including The Boston Globe, the New Art Examiner, the Spanish journal, Lapiz, and in the Lisbon daily Ò Publico.
Brody has received numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Basil H. Alkazzi Award, an Elizabeth Foundation Grant, two Massachusetts Artist Fellowships, two University of Washington Royalty Research Fund grants, and was a Fellow at the Shave International Artists’ Workshop in Somerset, England. He has been a visiting critic at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, The University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle since 1996.
He’s had a parallel career in music. Early on he played Swing, Bluegrass, Celtic and Klezmer music and recorded nine albums with various artists and groups on the Flying Fish, Rounder, and Vanguard labels. He has appeared at Avery Fisher Hall and Symphony Space in New York City, on Garrison Keillor’s radio show “A Prairie Home Companion and at major venues and festivals across the US, Canada, and Europe including the Philadelphia Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, and Nyon Folk Festival (Switzerland). He has published five books on music including the best-selling The Fiddler’s Fakebook. He currently writes and performs all original music.