Born in Fort Stockton, Texas, David Willburn lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. He earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts (Montpelier, VT). His work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including Dallas Contemporary (Dallas, Texas), San Diego Art Institute (San Diego, CA), University of Art and Design (Helsinki, Finland) Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Union Gallery at University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, WI), Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, Oregon), and Galleri Urbane (Dallas, Texas).

Statement

My work exists at the intersection of craft and fine art, and within that space I explore traditions of drawing, painting, and sculpture. The process of making mixed-media paintings, embroidered drawings, and installation projects often begins with images and ideas culled from contemporary culture and politics--photographs or memories of a specific event. Items and scenes from my own home, social institutions, or mass media are starting points that are filtered through layers of abstraction and analysis as a way of stripping away the familiarity and objectness of things and situations. These reimagined ideas and compositions are loaded with more possibility. In these abstractions I find new narratives, and I look for ways to queer the materials, reshaping and repurposing things through form and subject.