David Driskell

David Driskell
Name	David Driskell
Birth date	June 7, 1931
Birth place	Eatonton, Georgia, United States
Death date	April 1, 2020
Death place	Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Artist, curator, scholar, educator
Known for	Scholarship on African American art; painting; curatorial exhibitions

David Driskell was an American artist, scholar, curator, and educator whose work reshaped recognition of African American visual culture and modernist painting in the United States. He combined scholarly research, museum practice, pedagogy, and studio production to elevate artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Alma Thomas, and to document artistic networks tied to institutions like Howard University, Atlanta University, and the Smithsonian Institution. Driskell bridged regional histories from Georgia and the American South to national narratives centered in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

Early life and education

Born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1931, Driskell grew up amid the social landscape shaped by Jim Crow laws and the cultural legacies of the Great Migration that influenced many African American artists and intellectuals. He studied at Bethune-Cookman College before attending Howard University, where he encountered faculty and students connected to figures like Loïs Mailou Jones and James A. Porter. Later he pursued graduate studies at the Catholic University of America and completed advanced work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, engaging with scholarship linked to Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the pedagogical traditions of historically Black colleges and universities such as Fisk University and Spelman College.

Career and academic work

Driskell's academic career included appointments at Talladega College, Dillard University, Howard University, and University of Maryland, College Park, where he influenced generations of students and scholars. He held curatorial and advisory roles at institutions including the High Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. His landmark 1976 exhibition "Two Centuries of Black American Art"—organized with collaborators connected to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem—helped shift museum acquisition policies and scholarly attention toward artists long excluded from mainstream surveys. Driskell published catalog essays and monographs that referenced artists and historians such as Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, Gordon Parks, Toni Morrison, and Henry Taylor, situating visual practices within broader cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement.

Artistic practice and style

As a painter and mixed-media artist, Driskell developed a vocabulary that fused modernist abstraction with motifs drawn from African art, Gullah culture, Afro-Caribbean traditions, and southern vernacular aesthetics. His visual language engaged with the formal concerns of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko while dialoguing with figurative precedents including Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. Driskell often incorporated collage, printmaking, and textile references evocative of practices by Faith Ringgold and El Anatsui, and he utilized color relationships akin to Alma Thomas and Clyfford Still. Themes of memory, ancestry, ritual, and landscape recur across his paintings and prints, connecting to cultural touchstones such as Gullah Geechee heritage and celebrations like Juneteenth.

Exhibitions and curatorial work

Driskell curated and organized exhibitions that organized collections and archives to foreground African American artistic production, collaborating with curators and directors from The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Chicago History Museum, and regional museums across the American South. His exhibitions often toured venues including Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Howard University Gallery of Art, and the High Museum of Art, and influenced blockbuster shows held at the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He also served as consultant for retrospective exhibitions of artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Loïs Mailou Jones, integrating primary-source materials connected to archives like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Library of Congress.

Awards and honors

Driskell's contributions were recognized with numerous prizes and honors from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation-adjacent fellowships milieu, and awards from Howard University, Atlanta University Center, and the National Gallery of Art. He received honorary degrees and lifetime achievement recognitions from institutions such as Duke University, Brown University, University of the Arts, and professional associations tied to museums and art history scholarship. His work is represented in permanent collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous university and regional collections.

Personal life and legacy

Driskell maintained a practice as both artist and educator while mentoring figures who went on to careers at institutions like Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and across academic departments at Yale University, Columbia University, and Princeton University. His archives and papers were acquired by major repositories, informing ongoing scholarship on artists linked to the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, and postwar modernism. Driskell's legacy endures in contemporary exhibitions, curricula at institutions such as Howard University and Spelman College, and in the continued citation of his scholarship by curators and historians across museums and universities.

Category:American artists Category:African American artists Category:1931 births Category:2020 deaths