David Schafer is a visual artist who works across multiple platforms of production including collaborations with architects, graphic designers, voice actors, digital engineers, fabricators, and sound studios. Schafer’s work is driven by a wide range of theoretical and personal references, which manifests mostly around the idea of site, language, and the built environment. Appropriating from the vocabulary and motifs of Modernism, and an array of idiosyncratic subjects from popular culture and theory, Schafer develops projects that are sculptural as well as text, graphic, and sound based. Schafer’s work intertwines language and linguistics, with architectural form, as a critical exercise of spatial grammar that explore narrative structures.

Working between sculpture, sound, and graphic design, Schafer’s cacophonous and humorous pre-recorded and live mixed material is culled from instructional records, voice actors, sound effects, and noise. His interest in collapsing the structures of language and spatial grammar superimposes aspects of the intelligible with the unintelligible.

A recent public project for a hospital in Los Angeles titled “Separated United Forms”, involved the 3D scanning and appropriation of a small Henry Moore sculpture from the nearby Norton Simon Museum. The forms were then remixed and combined using modeling programs, then cast in bronze resulting in two large sculptures resting on a lighted concrete platform.

Schafer attended The Art Institute of Kansas City, Missouri from 1973-75.  He received a B.A. from the University of Missouri, Kansas City in 1979 and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Texas, Austin in 1983.  In addition to several public art projects, Schafer’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica; Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York; Works on Paper, Inc, Los Angeles; and PS1, Long Island City, New York; Van Rooy Gallery, Netherlands.  His work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions including those at; Lawrimore Project, Seattle, WA; The Sculpture Center, New York; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles; George Adams Gallery, New York; Artists Space; White Columns; The Drawing Center, New York; The Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, California State University Art Museum, Los Angeles, The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA; The De Vleeshal, Netherlands. In 2006, Schafer was awarded a One Percent for the Arts Commission for the Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, CA, and in 1989, Schafer received an artist award in Sculpture from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Schafer was a Professor of Fine Art and the Director of the Sculpture and Installation Program at Art Center College of Design in LA from 1998 to 2007, where he received numerous teaching awards. His other teaching experience includes; CalArts, Otis College of Art and Design, Parsons School of Art and Design, School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, and Rutgers. He is currently teaching at Parsons The New School.

Schafer’s work has been published in several exhibition catalogues as well as; Art issues, Flash Art, Sculpture Magazine, New Art Examiner, Art and Text, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Art Papers, Metropolis, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.  His sound works have been written about in NY Press, The Anti-Fun Magazine of Belgium, Cabinet Magazine and his own writings have appeared in Art Papers, X-tra, Cool and Strange Music Magazine, Exotica/Etcetera, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Documents Journal.