David Wilson
Designer • ImageMaker • Public Artist


Artist’s Statement
I wish to produce art that focuses on the experiences of my culture and ancestral heritage. There’s a pure beauty within the black experience that is manifested outwardly in our characteristic hues, features, and manner. My art serves as an entry point into a greater understanding of self and my rich heritage. It is during the process of creation that I realize my ability to stop time and shape reality into my own personal and universal metaphors.

While these metaphors are rooted in African American culture, I create for interpretation by everyone. My goal is to inspire introspection, education and communication by taking risks in my work. Through risk-taking, I feel as though I continue to celebrate a new direction in the pursuit of knowledge.

Creativity for me - whether I’m doing so by paint and brush or by mouse and pixel - still brings the end result of an artistic truth. Tapping into the collective conscious of my history and culture spawns so much of my work. This merging of the spiritual and the physical creates a unique song that plays in the minds and souls of my audience - regardless of the instrument with which I have chosen to play the music.

Biography
Born in WV, David Wilson is one of the leading NC African American artists of the generation that emerged in the wake of Romare Bearden and John Biggers. Wilson studied under Biggers while gaining his BFA at Hampton University (Hampton, VA) in the early 1990s. There, he absorbed the astute attention to culture and metaphor associated with Biggers' painting and printmaking.

Subsequently, Wilson returned to his earlier imprint from Bearden by refining his own visual and conceptual vocabulary that emerged through his focus on the points of intersection between technology and design with Bearden's unique synthesis of Cubist structure and southern folk traditions. The result are truly unique collages that weave myth and metaphor into universal themes of family, religion and culture that inspire introspection, education and communication.

Wilson’s work has been exhibited in Atlanta, Charlotte, DC, Miami and New York, as well as internationally in Germany and Spain. His work is included in notable private and celebrity collections.
In addition to his fine art accomplishments, Wilson creates architecturally scaled, public art that is cutting-edge and inspired from the people who live and work where the art will be placed. His most notable public work is the "Divergent Threads, Lucent Memories" glass mural facade for the Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture (Charlotte).