David Moore, Jr. initiated his current series of paintings in 2017 after assembling everyday objects into an evolving tableau: old fabric, bits of lumber, plumbing, packaging, ironwork, abandoned mechanical parts, toy soldiers, and plaster reproductions of iconic figures, including a large bust of Napoleon. “These arrangements often remind me of the scale models I built decades ago when designing stage settings for theatrical productions. I incorporates a ‘set’ from this detritus, and then transcribe what I see into paintings. In the activity of rendering, I’m always checking to see if what’s happening feels true to me. I have mishaps all the time, which are stimulating for their abstract results. As my spatial and visual experience has grown, so has my rendering of color.” All of David’s paintings are acrylic on canvas or on paper, matted and framed.

For three decades David worked professionally on the East Coast and in the Twin Cities in theater and performing arts, starting as a stagehand and later as manager and independent producer. He moved to the Twin Cities in 1987 to lead the Playwrights’ Center. In 1996 he formed 3 Legged Race New Theater & Performance, a multi-disciplinary company premiering more than sixty original works by rising and established artists from New York, Minnesota, and elsewhere. Of the hundreds of writers and artists he has supported many today number among the most recognized and influential in the field.

Since 2007 David has exhibited his visual work regionally in several group shows. Previous exhibitions include, Persistence of Vision, a two-person exhibit with the late Fred Larson, at the University of Minnesota, 2015; Armature at Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, 2017; and Searching High and Low, 2019, at The Woman’s Club of Minneapolis. In 2023 he will assist the University of Minnesota’s Quarter Gallery with an exhibition celebrating Fred Larson’s work, life, and influence.

A graduate of The Putney School, David earned an AB in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College, initially studying scenic design before switching to drawing and painting with Dimitri Hadzi and Flora Natapoff. At the Yale School of Drama, he studied dramaturgy and dramatic criticism under Richard Gilman, Leon Katz, Stanley Kauffmann, and Lloyd Richards, for whom he served as dramaturg for Yale Repertory Theatre’s world premiere of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. He has studied drawing and painting with Graham Nickson at the New York Studio School. At the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, he has studied with Hartmut Austen, Meg Bussey, Sean Connaughty, Lynn Gray, Diane Katsiaficas, Alexis Kuhr, Joyce Lyon, Avigail Manneberg, and Clarence Morgan. Among David’s current mentors is the artist, Lisa Nankivil.

David is active in arts, education, and other nonprofit activities. He serves currently as a trustee of the Guthrie Theater, whose government affairs committee he chairs, and on the boards of the Walker Art Center, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Camargo Foundation. He is a member of the National Council for the American Theatre (Theatre Communications Group) and a former trustee of the Minneapolis College of Arts & Design and the Highpoint Center for Printmaking.