Artist background: “I moved to Durham, NC, to accept the position of chief designer for the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1990 but was born in New York City. We lived in the Bronx and then Queens before moving to the suburbs to be closer to my father’s work. He was an aerospace engineer and a lifelong ‘shutterbug’ who gave me a Kodak Instamatic as a kid.
I fell in love with making pictures. I remember taking photos as a 10-year-old of the newly open ‘Eternal Flame’ at JKF’s grave in 1964 (our first and only family outing west of the Hudson or south of New York), and of the television set when space launches were broadcast live. A photo I shot of the TV with the caption ‘first man on moon,’ as Armstrong stepped onto the dust was pinned to a wall. Photography was magic.
In high school a friend introduced me to stop-frame animation and art photography. We’d walk around the East Village as street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank. I was also beginning to paint and draw seriously and set on a course to study art in college. As an art student (double majoring in biology) I connected with teachers and studio assistants who were into experimental photography and photo-serigraphy. I made, cut up, and reassembled photos in various mediums, beginning a course of experimentation that continues today.
After attending SUNY Buffalo and San Diego State University I began making furniture, working for an Italian architect in California and eventually landed in a great job building and then designing exhibitions for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. I was hooked on museum work and began a 40-year career in museum planning and design, including 30 years leading the North Carolina Museum of Art’s campus transformation from former prison site to today’s campus of galleries, amphitheater, and sculpture park.
COVID changed every aspect of life and was profound for me and my work. I decided at the height of the pandemic to retire from my long-held position as the Museum’s director of planning and design to focus once again on my art, relocating attention from the public realm to the studio. I’ve not withdrawn from public life (I’m still involved with environmental and museum design), but COVID signaled a time to pivot to back to my core and pushed me psychologically to turn the page and for that I am lucky and thankful.”
Studio practice: Photo-generated work that investigates the subjective boundaries between environmental disruptions and human dislocation. “Having spent forty years creating cultural spaces and environments for art in the public realm, I now focus my creative life on personal perspectives that convey a subjective, often “blurry” aesthetic to depict nature and the human condition void of edges or boundaries. Visual ambiguity and mystery are core to my picture-making, as are a deep interest in physical and environmental sciences, and material process of picture making.”
Picture making process: The process I most often use is of my own design, using non-traditional materials and with laborious effort. Long camera exposures are processed, digitally reversed, and archivally printed on clear acrylic panels. I then apply foundational layers of paint behind the image to provide luminosity before hand-polishing the surface with fine compounds.
Education: An autodidact who overcame a hearing disability, my university education was in painting and printmaking (SUNY Buffalo), furniture design, and photography (San Diego State University), and I hold a master’s in arts administration (Winthrop University). I’m self-taught in environmental design and architecture (through years of project collaborations)
Museum designer: As the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Director of Planning, Design & Museum Park (1990-2020), I initiated and lead the radical transformation of a former prison site to the creation of the Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park; directed the development of its renowned West Building; and have been nationally recognized for opening the Museum to cultural inclusion, environmental sustainability, and aesthetics.
Born in New York City, Dan lives in Durham, NC.