David Black (sculptor)

Black’s sculpture Skypiece has recently been restored and rebuilt as the permanent fountain centerpiece for the reopening of Mies van der Rohe´s New National Gallery in Berlin in the summer of 2021.

Black's monumental sculpture Wind Point won the Shikanai, First Prize in the Henry Moore International Sculpture Competition in Nagano, Japan in 1985. It is permanently installed atop a mountain at the entrance to the Utsukushi-ga-hara Art Museum.

Returning to the United States, Black received an “Individual Artist Grant” from the National Endowment of the Arts while being awarded a full professorship at the Ohio State University. It was at this time, around 1980, that he began producing monumental, abstract public sculpture, working again in metal, this time with massive plates of industrial aluminum.

In 1970, he received the two-year Artist in Residence grant from DAAD, the German Academic Exchange, to live in then West-Berlin, Germany. There, the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), commissioned the monumental sculpture, Skypiece, for its courtyard fountain and held an exhibition of his sculpture at the Amerika Haus, Berlin. He returned again in 1977 for a one-man-exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie. This exhibition was shown as well at the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany.

While further investigating the monumental structures, this time of ancient Meso-America, he set up a temporary studio in Mexico in 1966, casting in aluminum and designing wall-hangings to be woven in wool by local, Indigenous weavers.

For the first 12 years, he made exclusively ceramic pottery and sculptures, winning the First Prize for Ceramics at the American Crafts Museum in New York in 1957. Later he received fellowships that took him to other countries and ancient cultures. A Fulbright fellowship grant in 1962 allowed him to live a year and a half in Florence, Italy, investigating ancient Etruscan art, making sculptures(in the former studio of Leonardo Da Vinci) and having them cast in bronze in nearby Pistoia.

He left Cape Ann in 1946 to study science at Wesleyan University. During the summers he returned to work as a lifeguard on Gloucester's Wingaersheek Beach where he met sculptor George Aarons, who had a studio in the sand dunes nearby. The experience made such an impression, that two years into college, he changed his major to art, embarking on a career as a sculptor.

David Black (born May 29, 1928) is an American sculptor known for his large scale public sculptures.

David Black was born in 1928 on the island of Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose ocean seascape, rough granite shoreline and iconic white lighthouses, white oceanside hotels, white churches and ships were to dominate his work his entire career. He later revealed that a near death experience as a very young child where he was not expected to live after falling from a tree, was a driving force in his lifelong obsession with archaic, spiritual forms and architecture.

His Flyover in Dayton, a stainless steel “flight path” arch 46 meters long (150 feet) and five stories tall, commemorating the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903, won an international competition and was awarded the “Meritorious Structure Award” from the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations in 1999. In 2010–2011 David Black finished two major public sculptures: Liftoff in Downtown Washington D.C and Fire Dance in Fort Myers.