David Humphrey: Election Day
November 5, 2024
Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.
In honor of Election Day 2024, painter, sculptor, writer, educator, and musician David Humphrey begins his mixtape with the ominous Megastorm by Trans Am—an apt choice for an uncertain moment.
Humphrey’s work is a bit hard to categorize—people with carefully rendered clothes and hairstyles merge directly into other people or melt down into passages of pure abstraction. The clarity of the abstract picture plane breaks apart into pictorial space, only to rush back to the surface again, a trick observed by the two camera-wielding bathers occupying Shutterbugs, 2014.
Humphrey describes the construction of a painting vis a vis his series of works about ecstasy. How can one depict that loss of personal boundaries? What are the formal characteristics of extreme emotion? How does the opticality of painting connect to the other aspects of the sensorium? Was Cezanne the original psychedelic artist?
We talk about what he means by “militant shallowness,” authenticity in art, and embedding popular/vernacular culture into his work; using once- or never-loved found images/objects from commercial production in painting or sculpture. This use of found source material also connects to Humphrey’s expansive view of collaboration, a mode of working (with real and imaginary collaborators) he’s enjoyed for decades.
David Humphrey has an upcoming show, porTraits, at Fredericks & Freiser gallery in New York, opening December 12, 2024. His work can be found on his website, and you can follow him on instagram.
From 2004-2008, Humphrey had a half-hour show on WPS1 art radio called Sound and Vision with a similar premise to the Selection Committee Radio Show. You can listen to those shows now on Apple Podcasts.
CORRECTION: Stravinsky’s piece The Soldier’s Tale Suite was written in 1918; 1968, the date I mentioned, was actually the date of the recording.
- Megastorm, Trans Am
- Little Umbrellas, Frank Zappa
- The Mac Man, Archie Shepp
- Bridge, Amon Tobin
- The Soldier’s Tale Suite: II. Airs by a Stream; Igor Stravinsky, Columbia Chamber Ensemble
- The Green, Jenny Scheinman
- My Beautiful Leah, PJ Harvey
- Gambia, Sona Jobarteh
- One More, Weaves
- Contort Yourself, The Contortions
- Room Mate, Lizzy Mercier Descloux
- As We Used to Sing, Bushman’S Revenge
- Black Satin, Miles Davis
- Fleurette Africaine (African Flower), Duke Ellington
- Constant Velocity Is As Natural As Being at Rest, Candiria
- Four Cypresses, Grizzly Bear
- Section I; Steven Reich, Erik Hall
- Fire Back About Your New Baby’s Sex, Don Caballero
- One Is Conspiracy, Junior Electronics
- Violin Concertino: III. Rotto; Kurt Rohde, Axel Strauss, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Matilda Hofman
- Bullet Proff, This Is The Kit
- Wild, The Inner Banks
- Sons of Garvey, Joe Higgs
- Extrapolation, John McLaughlin
- The Unanswered Question; Charles Ives, Cincinnati Philharmonic, Gerhard Samuel
- Ricercar, “Bonny Sweet Robin;” Thomas Simpson, Musica Dolce, Clas Pehrsson
- Eguetmar, Noura Mind Seymali
- Masquerader; Joan As Police Woman, Tony Allen, Dave Okumu
- For Amiri Baraka, Vijay Iyer Sextet
- I Want It All, Shey Baba
- Sexual For Elizabeth, Tortoise
David Humphrey is a New York artist who has shown nationally and internationally. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing. He teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University and is represented by the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NY who published a monograph on his work in 2020 by Davy Lauterbach.
Website: davidhumphreynyc.com
Instagram: @aikenhump