︎         Davewalshstudio@gmail.com  


Dave Walsh is a painter who lives and works in Philadelphia. His work investigates the facilitation of American landscapes mythologies through infrastructrue and architecture. He received his B.F.A from Tyler School of Art and his M.F.A from Yale School of Art. He was a 2105-16 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. 

Education

2015         M.F.A. Painting, Yale School of Art New Haven, Connecticut
2010         B.F.A. Painting and Drawing, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Awards

2023        Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant
2021         Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant
2018         F. Lammot Belin Grant, Waverly Community House, Waverly, PA
2017          First Place, 215/610 Contemporary, Code Switch, Juried by Odili Odita
2015         The Barry Schactman Scholarship, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2010         Painting Faculty Award, Tyler School of Art

Residencies

2015-16    Fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA
2014         Princes Drawing School Residency, Dumfries House, East Ayrshire, Scotland

Solo Exhibitions

2023        Afterburn, Peep Projects, Philadelphia, PA
2022        Stereograph, Taymour Grahne Projects, Online Solo 
2021         Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2019         Dave Walsh, Small Works Gallery, Waverly Community House, Waverly, PA
2016         Dave Walsh, School House Gallery, Provincetown, MA
2016         Apprehension, Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA

Selected Exhibitions

2023        Pull, Ruffed Grouse Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY
2019         Dave Walsh & Cody Mack, AFA Gallery, Scranton, PA
2019         Landmarks, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2019         Faculty Exhibit, Villanova University, Villanova, PA
2019         Terra not so Firma, Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2018         Nostalgia of Land, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA
2018         Big Link, Standard Projects, Hortonville, WI curated by Kate Mothes
2018         77th Woodmere Annual, Woodmere Art Museum, Chestnut Hill, PA
2018         What Time is This Place? Community Arts, Phoenixville, PA
2017         215/610 Contemporary, Code Switch, Gallery at Delaware County
                 Community College, Media, Pennsylvania- Juried by Odili Donald Odita
2017         Baker's Dozen, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA
2016        Prompts and Wonders of the Everyday, Center for Emerging Artists,
                 Philadelphia, PA, Curated by Hitomi Iwasaki
2016        Fellows Exhibition, Provincetown Art Association Museum, Provincetown, MA
2015        Yale Painting and Printmaking 2015, Garis & Hahn, New York, NY
2015        2015, But Whose Counting? Thesis Show, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2013        In Front of Strangers, I Sing: 72nd Annual Juried Exhibition
                 Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA, Juried by Dona Nelson

Publications

2015 New American Paintings #117, The Open Studios Press, Editor’s Choice

Selected Teaching

2016-2024        Adjunct Assistant Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture
2021-2024        Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of the Arts
2022-2023       Adjunct Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College
2017-2022         Adjunct Professor, Villanova University





I am a painter whose work critiques how landscape and nature in the contemporary moment have been shaped by problematic yet culturally coveted traditions of depiction in 19th-century American landscape paintings, photographs, and the creation of the National Parks. My large-scale paintings depict what is outside of the frame of the postcard, photograph, or painting. My project confronts the lasting imperial rhetoric of this tradition permeating through literature, imagery and architecture that propagates a nationalist mythology of dominion, divinity, and whiteness.

Acknowledging the history of fiction in landscape painting, my paintings announce their own fiction, a system of shifting perspective, flat skewed planes of color, and illogical moments. I translate my position of not knowing but feeling my way through these problems, their histories, and contradictions with sensitivity and nuance.

Reckoning with this tradition began after studying painting at Tyler School of Art, when I hiked the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,100-mile footpath from Georgia to Maine, in 2011. I saw a preoccupation with viewing the landscape preserved in a language of rustic frontier aesthetics. This five-month experience laid the foundation for analyzing landscape mythologies and my participation in them as the crux of my artistic practice.

The myth of white men discovering themselves through nature is one I intimately know from my youth camping and backpacking. The power of the white imperialist gaze and its obsession with conquering, summiting, and wilderness are fundamental frontier myths.  My paintings undermine the power of that gaze to find a form more capable of knowing and living with the land.

The focus of my practice is large paintings ranging from five to ten feet wide. This scale responds to the monumental landscape tradition in the United States established by artists like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. Their paintings omitted Indigenous Peoples and the systematic violence perpetrated on them. Landscape painting contributed to the wilderness myth by denying Indigenous peoples' existence in order to justify expansion and resource extraction.

My process of making paintings involves travel and research. It begins with fieldwork in national parks and recreation areas, where I collect memories, photographs and drawings. In the studio, I then contextualize these references with primary and secondary sources, including archival documents, imagery and literature that allow me to investigate the construction of a specific place-myth.

What is at stake in my work, then, is no less than deconstructing the ideology of power, place, masculinity, and whiteness within the history of the United States. Landscape has been too often overlooked as an agent which naturalizes mythologies of power and ecological destruction. My paintings trouble these historical frameworks so we can begin to develop a deeper and darker ecological perspective of our world. My work is one part of this greater struggle, searching for and developing new forms to undermine the language of landscape representation as an innocuous pictorial strategy and to find newer and healthier ways of looking at the world.


Peep is proud to present Afterburn: a catalog printed on the occasion of Dave Walsh’s solo exhibition at Peep Projects. The catalog features high quality images of all paintings shown in the exhibition paired alongside a thoughtful conversation between Kati Gegenheimer and Dave Walsh exploring themes of the American Frontier mythos, the history of landscape painting, and Walsh’s personal qualms with both when creating this specific body of work and in his overall practice. This limited edition catalog is selling for $15.

https://peepprojects.org/store/p/afterburn-catalog