Open Air: Artist Talk with David Shrobe

Open Air is a monthly series of virtual studio visits and intimate conversations with Black artists across the globe hosted by the Gantt. For May, Open Air features assemblage artist David Shrobe, hosted by curator Dexter Wimberly.

New York based David Shrobe creates assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies, and especially from around his familial home. He disassembles furniture, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Traversing different approaches his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question, while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.

David Shrobe (b.1974, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. He holds an MFA and a BFA in Painting from Hunter College. Shrobe’s work was currently included in The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, and in Lineages: Works from the Collection at NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Shrobe has had recent solo exhibitions at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA. He has participated in group exhibitions at CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY; Mandeville Gallery at Union College, Schenectady, NY; the Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Shrobe’s work is held in the Permanent Collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Block Museum, Evanston, IL; Union College, Schenectady, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; The University of Arizona Museum of Art; University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Collection; and Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit.

Video: Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough with David Shrobe

David Shrobe. Baptized by the Sound of Horns, 2019. Oil, acrylic, ink, graphite, wood, metal, tiles, fabric, canvas, vinyl, flocking, rubber, and mixed media. 105 x 79 x 4 inches.

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, The Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, KOKI Arts in Tokyo, Bode Projects in Berlin, and The Third Line in Dubai. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications including The New York Times and Artforum; and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Kinkade Family Foundation. Wimberly is a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency in Japan. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the online education platform, CreativeStudy.