David Black, internationally recognized for his monumental sculptures, has created more than two dozen public projects throughout the US, as well as in Japan and Germany. Three commissions were won in international competitions. Jetty, a pavilion-sculpture, rests on a lagoon in San Francisco bay, Belmont, California. Sonora fronts the main library plaza in Tucson, Arizona. Stainless steel 45' Rapids is in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Euclid's Circle centers Cleveland's University Circle. Windpoint stands at the Utsukushi-ga-Hara museum's entrance in Nagano, Japan...

Donald Kuspit, Art critic, editor Art Criticism journal, and author The Cult of The Avant-Garde
Excerpts from Donald Kuspit interview in Black on White, Manhattan, 2000, Umbrella Films - Berlin

"Of all the American artists that I know, who make works that are meant for public space, David Black is unequivocally the most important. His work is both architecturally significant in the way it relates to the buildings surrounding it, and sculpturally significant in terms of the play of its forms in three-dimensional space, and the way it relates to and in space. It's dynamic in space."

"And I think he makes an original contribution. He's somebody who is essentially making what I would call spiritual structures, but by spiritual structures I don't mean anything particularly pretentious, yet structures that somehow convey some sense of inwardness and seem made for the viewer. I think the symbol of this is the fact that in a number of the pieces, he has a kind of seat where the spectator can place him or herself. You have, in other words, a participatory sculpture."

"I enjoy David Black's later temple type works very much. When I first saw them I thought they were some clearly special structures, but it was David's own interest in temples, his traveling through the world and conscientiously studying different kinds of temples and trying to transpose the temple idea into a modernist idiom. He just liberates it. He opens it up.

"Another reason I like it very much is that it's rather optimistic in a situation where there's not much optimistic art. The art today is very ironical or parodical, even cynical."

"The world is, certainly in New York, a harsh place. I would love to see one of David Black's sculptures right outside of Lincoln Center. I think it would be absolutely fantastic in the open plaza there. It would be quite extraordinary to have a white one surging up. It would immediately be a place where people would congregate. It would be a sculptural, three-dimensional, solid 'fountain'. His has that fountain surge to it - a little uplift to counter the down-trodding, the harsh."

"Black has a unique sculpture. His work is a rebellion against the mass culture which comes with our anonymous environment. Particularly the later ones are subtly nuanced, which to me is a sign of his growth. That piece he just finished, Rapids, is incredible. Just extraordinary!"

David Black, a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, received his BA, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, at Wesleyan University-Connecticut, his MA at Indiana University, and is emeritus professor of art at Ohio State University.

Honors:
Invited by the German government to its D.A.A.D. Kunstler Programm, an international invitational two year grant to live and have exhibitions in Berlin, Germany. During this time Die Neue Nationalgalerie-Berlin commissioned Skypiece 22' for its sculpture court pool. Black also won a Fulbright Fellowship to Florence, Italy. The National Endowment for The Arts awarded him an "Individual Artist Grant". Windpoint 26', won the "Shikanai" (top) prize in Japan's Henry Moore International Sculpture Competition. The Ohio House of Representatives' awarded him "Career Recognition". Flyover, his 150' stainless steel "flight path", a memorial to the Wright brothers' first flight, won in an international competition, and later was chosen by The National Council of Structural Engineers' Associations for its national "Special Projects" award in Seattle.

Major Exhibitions:
The Contemporaries Gallery, New York. P.S. One, New York. The Gilman Gallery, Chicago. The Taft Museum, Cincinnati, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, The University of Iowa Art Museum, and The Dayton Art Institute. In Germany: Die Neue Nationalgalerie-Berlin, and Amerika Haus-Berlin. Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum-Duisburg, Germany. Utsukushi-ga-Hara Museum, Nagano, Japan.