BIOGRAPHY
David John Attyah is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist, who works across traditional, digital, and public practices. He founded of community art space PhlatPhile (2011 - 2016), co-founder of artist collaborative THINK AGAIN (1999 - 2012), and is currently Professor of Studio Art at Glendale Community College and former director of The Art Gallery @ GCC (2014 - 2020).
Attyah’s studio practice is anchored in the clarity and complexity of drawing, using the broadest variety of materials & means. His work emphasizes the richness of mark-making, the spontaneity of gesture, the impact of scale, and the dynamism of the human figure. Although his themes are contemplative, inward, and often somber in tone, he focuses on the elegance and simplicity of drawing as a mode of finding insight, synthesis, and healing.
In his identity as a printmaker, Attyah’s press work uses the inherently unstable nature of graphic reproduction to investigate the analogous instability of social-produced identity. Via printmaking – defined broadly as traditional techniques, hybrid processes, and digital technologies – he exploits the tension duplication and variation, the photographic and the handmade, the pristine and the flawed. His work also utilizes the linguistic tendencies of printmaking, using bits of appropriated (stenciled, etched) imagery to form a visual language of self.
In his outward identity, Attyah’s public projects, under the auspices of artist collaborative THINK AGAIN, recruit artmaking in the service of political transformation. His public works - digital murals, billboards and wallscapes, exterior projections, and viral poster campaigns – link the global to the local and call people to collective participation. Recent projects connect emotions lik empathy, nostalgia, alienation, and optimism to community action. THINK AGAIN is collaboration between David John Attyah and contemporary artist S.A. Bachman.
Attyah’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Cinemateca Nacional (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), Museo de Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), and the Worcester Art Museum (Boston, MA), and has been published in range of books and periodicals including Graphic Agitation (Phaidon: 2004), Art/Text, and Ms. Magazine. Attyah is co-author of the monograph A Brief History of Outrage (2003) and has published a volume of his print work, entitled The Jugular (2014).
Attyah has his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, his MA in Cultural Anthropology from Harvard University, and his BA in Public Policy from Princeton University.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS AND BOOKS
A mark for every body: Drawings and Public Readings by David John Attyah, The Art Gallery @ GCC, February 2023.
The Museum of Selective Homo Amnesia, Advocate and Gochis Galleries, Los Angeles LGBT Center, Fall 2022.
Eros in Ruin, The Art Gallery @ GCC, Los Angeles, October 2015.
Closet Door, Advocate and Gochis Galleries, Los Angeles LGBT Center, Los Angeles, January 2015.
Relicario, Plaza de Cultura, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, November, 2014.
The Jugular, monograph, January 2014.
THINK AGAIN: Collected Public Works, Advocate and Gochis Galleries, Los Angeles LGBT Center, 2012.
Punch/Utopia, David John Attyah and Mark Gens, Glendale Temporary Exhibitions, Brand Boulevard and Broadway, October 2011.
Actions Speak, The Wall @ WAM, Worcester Art Museum (Boston), 2009-2010.
A Brief History of Outrage by THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah + SA Bachman), Los Angeles: Politicizing Pictures Press, 2003.
SELECTED PRESS
Artillery Magazine, “David John Attyah,” Richard May, December 2022
Afterimage, “Participatory Politics,” Natalie Loveless, Vol. 38 No. 2, Fall 2010
Worcester Art Museum, “Wall at WAM: ACTIONS SPEAK,” Susan Stoops, 2009
Los Angeles Times, “Drive-by Campaign to Project Points of View,”
Mike Boehm, October 6, 2006
Introductory Essay, The Jugular: David John Attyah, 2014
Introductory Essay, A Brief History of Outrage, David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman, 2003