Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, installation, sculpture, printmaking
Website: david-huffman.com
David Huffman was born in 1963 in Berkeley, California. His mother, Dolores Davis, was an activist and artist who designed the iconic “Free Huey [Newton]” flag used at Black Panther rallies; as a young child, Huffman marched at protests alongside her. He studied at the New York Studio School (1984–85) and received his MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 1999. He has lived and worked in Oakland throughout his career and teaches at California College of the Arts. He is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, LACMA, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Crocker Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Embassy of the United States in Dakar, Senegal.
Huffman works in painting, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, developing an evolving visual lexicon over thirty years that fuses Afrofuturism, abstraction, and pop iconography. His best-known figures are his “Traumanauts” — Black astronauts in white space suits navigating a cosmic landscape — developed in 1998 to imagine a space outside the historical ruptures of slavery and racism, where “all things can happen, all possibilities are available.” The Traumanaut series is both celebratory and wounded: these figures exist in an atemporal dimension where past, present, and future commingle. Later series expanded his iconography to include basketballs, pyramids, Pan-African flag colors, and abstract deep-space fields. Throughout, Huffman combines formal abstraction with pointed social commentary, using glitter, acrylic, gesso, and collage to build dense, layered, charged compositions.
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