David Schafer (born 1955) is an American visual and sound artist based in Los Angeles. His practice integrates aural, textual, graphic and sculptural elements to create installations, public art and individual works that critics describe as immersive, spatial experiments.Tumlir, Jan. "Multiple Choice: On 'Separated United Forms,'" in Separated United Forms, David Schafer (author), Milan/New York: Charta Art Books, 2011. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Ollman, Leah. "A Heady Jumble of a Show by David Schafer," Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2015. Retrieved May 17, 2019.Wholey, M.A. "David Schafer Finds Male Hysteria Simmering Beneath the Surface of Art History," Artsy, February 9, 2015. Retrieved June 3, 2019. Schafer's approach combines self-consciously formalist aesthetics, a Pop Art sensibility, and postmodern Deconstructionist intent, often appropriating and reframing cultural motifs in order to investigate systems of historical and cultural memory, built space, and language.Tanguy, Sarah. "'Body Space' Baltimore Museum of Art," Sculpture Magazine, December 2001.Tumlir, Jan. "Models of Disorder," Artforum, June 2015. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Gopnik, Blake. "Pure and Simple: Art That Causes a Sensation," The Washington Post, February 25, 2001. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Frank, Peter. "Oskar Fischinger, David Schafer," LA Weekly, December 6–12, 1996. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes his work as a "heady jumble" producing collisions, contradictions and convergences involving architecture, sound, sculpture, language and theory in order to "disrupt communication intentionally, incisively, through strategies of fragmentation and interruption."
Schafer has exhibited at the Whitney Museum,Krapp, Peter. Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Retrieved June 3, 2019. MoMA PS1,Brenson, Michael. "'Engaging Objects', Audience Participation in Cultural Zoo." The New York Times, May 30, 1986. Retrieved June 3, 2019. The Drawing Center, MASS MoCA, Baltimore Museum of Art,McNatt, Glenn. "BMA’s BodySpace," The Baltimore Sun, February 18, 2001. Long Beach Museum of Art,Lombino, Mary-Kay. "A Model Experience," ReModeling, Catalog Essay, Long Beach, CA: California State University Long Beach, The University Art Museum, 2004. SculptureCenter, and Vleeshal Middelburg (the Netherlands).Artweek.LA. "David Schafer: Models of Disorder,". Retrieved June 3, 2019.Chang, Jade. "Q&A: David Schafer," Metropolis Magazine, December 2012. He has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner FoundationPollock-Krasner Foundation. "Pollock-Krasner Foundation announces 2018-2019 grants totaling over $3 million," Press Releases, April 17, 2018. Retrieved June 3, 2019. and National Endowment for the Arts, and commissions from the Public Art Fund and Los Angeles County Arts Commission.Clark, James M. "Liberty Prop," Quarterly Newsletter of the Public Art Fund Inc., Fall 1991.Benson, Melissa. "Pastoral Mirage, David Schafer," Pastoral Mirage, Exhibition publication, New York: City of New York Parks and Recreation, Prospect Arts Alliance Commission, 1993. He has taught sculpture, art theory, digital media and sound on the East and West coasts since 1985, and is currently at ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles.Schou, Solvej. "Psychic Liberation: Fine Art’s Sound Lab Makes Waves of Noise," DOT Magazine, Art Center College of Design, August 8, 2017. Retrieved June 3, 2019.ArtCenter College of Design. "David Schafer,". Retrieved June 3, 2019.
Biography Schafer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where he studied environmental graphics with Victor Papanek and was influenced by sculptor Dale Eldred. He completing a BFA at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1978 and earned an MFA in Sculpture and minor in Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas in 1983. Interdisciplinary work there with Peter Saul, Robert Yarber, John Baldessari, Vito Acconci and Siah Armajani influenced his understanding of the built world and use of social critique and humor. After moving to New York, he worked for artists Dennis Oppenheim and Alice Aycock; their use of research, historical and philosophical references, drawing, site specificity and public scale made a lasting impression on his work.Brenson, Michael. "City as Sculpture Garden: Seeing the New and Daring," The New York Times, July 17, 1987. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
Schafer began to receive public recognition in the late 1980s, including an NEA award and the first of three Public Art Fund commissions (1988–93). While in New York, he exhibited at PS1, Artists Space, White Columns and Art in General, and began teaching at the School of Visual Arts (1985–96) and Parsons School of Design (1994–6).McCracken David. "Serra, Other Artists Enliven Season`s End," Chicago Tribune, August 18, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
In 1996, he moved to Los Angeles and expanded into sound works and performances.Noriyuki, Duane. "Perception, Deception: Beyond Model Homes," Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2004. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Smith, Jeffrey P. "Vital Victuals: A (Post)Modern Remix," The Brooklyn Rail, September 5, 2011. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Frank, Peter. "Beyond Music Sound Festival," LA Weekly, May 7–13, 1998, p. 116. He taught at Otis College of Art and Design (1996–2000), Cal Arts (2002), and ArtCenter College of Design (1998–present), where he developed a sculpture program bridging fine arts, digital media and environmental design. After a return to New York and positions at Parsons and Cornell, he went back to ArtCenter in 2013, where he founded and developed the school's Sound Lab in Fine Art program and curriculum. In 2024, he received ArtCenter's part-time Great Teacher Award.ArtCenter College of Design. "Faculty members recognized as "Great Teachers" at ArtCenter College of Design summer commencement," August 16, 2024. Retrieved July 1, 2025.
Work Because it is multidisciplinary, Schafer's work can be difficult to categorize; he has created sculpture, installations and public art projects that incorporate built structures, prints, sound elements and text, as well as sound works, all of which engage cultural and historical works and tropes whose ideas he reconfigures visually, spatially or sonically for reconsideration. Artforum critic Jan Tumlir traces Schafer's artistic strategies to his emergence in the 1980s amid the theoretical flowering of deconstruction and its critical dismantling of historical and cultural conventions, including modernism.
Sculpture and installations Schafer's early art explored public and private space and perception, implicating sculpture as a staged experience and disrupting exhibition conventions through physical engagement.Zimmer, William. "Sculpture Carefully Created for a Site," The New York Times, June 28, 1987. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Myers, Terry. New York in Review: "Western Agenda", Arts Magazine, September 1991.Zhdanovics, Olga. "Living Room," New Art Examiner, 1993.Lombino, Mary-Kay. "David Schafer at Dollhouse Gallery," Artweek, July/August, 1998, p. 31. Folly (1986), Western Agenda (1991) and Model for Wild Harmony (1993) were skeletal, theatrical sculptures referencing Russian Constructivism that invited viewers to swing on them and ascend ladders or suspended platforms, subverting conventions by reversing the roles of observer and observed, audience and object.Butler, Connie. "From Rocky Balboa to Carl Andre," Western Agenda, Exhibition Publication, New York: Artists Space, 1991.Fernandes, Joyce. "Living Room," Exhibition essay. Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Betty Rymer Gallery, 1993.
In the mid-1990s, Schafer incorporated digital printing and fabrication processes into works exploring social space, social control, consumption, cultural memory and everyday objects.Johnson, Ken. "Photasm," The New York Times, November 10, 2000. Retrieved June 3, 2019.Johnson, Ken."Adam Ross and David Schafer," The New York Times, September 28, 2001. Retrieved June 3, 2019. Mother Mall (1996) was a large modular sculpture that resembled a quasi-organic space vessel or shopping mall model (including Muzak accompaniment) and referenced science-fiction and suburban dystopias. It was set on a ring of sawhorses surrounded by wall works appropriating banal, consumer-culture ephemera that critic Peter Frank deemed "suffused with the relentless cheesiness and ravenous narcissism of [various] verbal symptoms of our alienated stupefaction."Morgan, Margaret. "David Schafer," Art/Text, 57, 1997, p. 91.Kandel, Susan. "Images of the Past and an Uncertain Present," Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1996.
Cluster 38 (1997) and Stepped Density (1999–2001) reworked the ergonomics of fast-food furniture design and rules of public space, creating what The Washington Post called "Pop-artish, tongue-in-cheek" sculptures of geometric rigor and high finish "hovering in a perfect middle ground between high formalist aesthetics and low commercial culture."Sozanski, Edward J. "Trolling For Clarity on The Future," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1999. How High Is Up? (2003–4) took on architectural models, transforming a Three Stooges episode still of an improbable structure made out of chaotically arranged I-beams into a gleaming, Anthony Caro-like abstract sculpture; with detailed computer renderings and posters comically referencing Frank Gehry-style, deconstructivist architecture, Schafer enacted a cultural leveling, imbuing an object meant to represent human error and chaos with authority and rationality.
Spoken-word soundtracks and digital prints came to the fore in Schafer's work in the 2000s (much of it gathered in the retrospective exhibition, Models of Disorder, 2015). This later work investigated established history, language and truth through the lenses of patriarchy, modernism and pop-culture.Zellen, Jody. "David Schafer," Visual Art Source, February 16, 2015. Retrieved June 3, 2019. What Should a Museum Sound Like? (2010, Whitney Biennial) presented a digitally fabricated, sound-equipped museum sculpture playing an actor's recording of text by the museum's architect, Marcel Breuer, distorted with sounds created by transcoding the site's floor plans and drawings with a sound design program. What Should a Painter Do? (2011) referenced a Barnett Newman painting series with text works, audio of Newman explaining his ideas, and a bare-bones, De Stijl-like sculptural installation. In both cases, the grand formalist theories referenced by the structures and recordings are undermined by garbled, chaotic soundtracks, suggesting alternative perspectives for assessing such claims to truth. Four Letters to Mahler (2013) explored similar strategies based on letters written by Arnold Schoenberg to Gustav Mahler.Mattern, Shannon. "Aesthetic Bounty—Or, Binging on Artstuffs," Words in Space, November 29, 2013. Retrieved June 3, 2019.
In 2025, Schafer presented "Forum" (Phase Gallery), a solo exhibition of immersive environments merging sound, sculpture and visual elements. Referencing ancient Roman architecture (in the installations Pantheon and Colosseum), the show examined how contemporary social structures are shaped by coded signs, corporate spectacle and institutional influence.Phase Gallery. "David Schafer: Forum," 2025. Retrieved July 1, 2025.
Public projects