David Nelson (1960-2013) was an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Rigorous and precise, Nelson engaged process, time, chance and a finely tuned attention to the natural world.
Nelson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at Petersburg Gallery, Debs & Co, and Barbara Gladstone in NYC, at Tracy Williams in Paris, as well as many group exhibitions, which include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. A posthumous survey exhibition at 80WSE Gallery was curated by Jonathan Berger and Nancy Brooks Brody in 2015,
with an accompanying catalogue.
Originally from California, Nelson moved to NYC and began making art in the mid 1970’s. By the 1980’s he had a studio on East 14th street and became friends with the artists Robert Bordo, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Tony Feher, Zoe Leonard, Angela Muriel, Nicolas Rule, Rafael Sanchez, and Carrie Yamaoka. This peer group’s formative years coincided with the onset of the AIDS crisis, which deepened their camaraderie, with many of them becoming involved with ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985 Nelson met the artist David Knudsvig, who remained his life partner up until Knudsvig’s death from AIDS in 1993.
Nelson’s practice included his ongoing involvement with photograms. Photograms are made without a camera, by placing objects and materials directly on light sensitive emulsion coated paper in a darkroom, exposing it to light and developing it, resulting in unique silver gelatin prints. For the photogram series titled “From the series …”, Nelson used an antique spirograph, a geometric drawing toy – to create intricate circular patterns of white lines on lush flat black surfaces.
Barry Paddock, a close friend of David Nelson, has been overseeing and safeguarding Nelson’s work since his death in 2013. For this year’s TAG Limited Art Edition, Paddock has generously opened Nelson’s archives and worked with the artists Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard and Carrie Yamaoka, to produce a limited edition of archival pigment prints from one of Nelson’s original unique spirograph works.
Being HIV+, David Nelson respected TAG’s work and benefited from the research, advocacy and treatments that TAG worked so hard to make accessible to people living with HIV. Nelson helped install the first TAG exhibition of Ben Thornberry’s black and white photographs of ACT UP in 1999. That exhibition became the genesis of the annual TAG Limited Art Edition.
