David W. Cummings

David W. Cummings was born in Eastern Oklahoma in 1937. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute earning a BFA and the University of Nebraska earning an MFA.

 In the late 1960s, Cummings was one of the early pioneering artists who moved into a loft in SoHo on Broome Street. Working with his ideas of color he was included in a group show at the OK Harris Gallery and in a major museum show, “Lyrical Abstraction” that was first shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut and then traveled to several museums across the United States with its final exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City where it became part of their permanent collection. He had his first solo exhibition at the Henri Gallery in Washington D.C. He also exhibited in shows with the Allan Stone Gallery and Gallery Alexandra Monett in Brussels. He was a two time recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant and a Ford Foundation Grant. His work is in public and corporate collections throughout the United States and Europe.

 For the last 30 years of his career, Cummings explored, as he stated, “the oldest personal image of the individual human, the handprint or hand tracing.” He attempted to bring it up to date as a visual self-portrait of the twenty-first century. The question he asked was if he could take such an image that has such a long human history, found in kindergarten classroom paintings, used in commercial ads and mass communications and still transform that image into his very own personal statement of Contemporary High Art?

Cummings died suddenly in New York City in May 2019.

Website: https://davidwcummings.net/

Instagram: @dw_cummings