David Schafer

David Schafer, Reflected Terrain, polished stainless steel and LED lighting, 101' x 6", 2025. David Schafer (born 1955) is an American visual and sound artist based in Los Angeles. His practice integrates aural, textual, graphic and sculptural elements to create installations, public art and individual works that critics describe as immersive, spatial experiments. Schafer's approach combines self-consciously formalist aesthetics, a Pop Art sensibility, and postmodern Deconstructionist intent, often appropriating and reframing cultural motifs in order to investigate systems of historical and cultural memory, built space, and language. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes his work as a "heady jumble" producing collisions, contradictions and convergences involving architecture, sound, sculpture, language and theory in order to "disrupt communication intentionally, incisively, through strategies of fragmentation and interruption." MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, MASS MoCA, Baltimore Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, and Vleeshal Middelburg (the Netherlands). He has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and commissions from the Public Art Fund and Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

Biography Schafer was born in Kansas City, Missouri.

Schafer began to receive public recognition in the late 1980s, including an NEA award and the first of three Public Art Fund commissions (1988–93). While in New York, he exhibited at PS1, Artists Space, White Columns and Art in General, and began teaching at the School of Visual Arts (1985–96) and Parsons School of Design (1994–6). He taught at Otis College of Art and Design (1996–2000), Cal Arts (2002), and ArtCenter College of Design (1998–present), where he developed a sculpture program bridging fine arts, digital media and environmental design.

Work Because it is multidisciplinary, Schafer's work can be difficult to categorize; he has created sculpture, installations and public art projects that incorporate built structures, prints, sound elements and text, as well as sound works, all of which engage cultural and historical works and tropes whose ideas he reconfigures visually, spatially or sonically for reconsideration. Folly (1986), Western Agenda (1991) and Model for Wild Harmony (1993) were skeletal, theatrical sculptures referencing Russian Constructivism that invited viewers to swing on them and ascend ladders or suspended platforms, subverting conventions by reversing the roles of observer and observed, audience and object.

In the mid-1990s, Schafer incorporated digital printing and fabrication processes into works exploring social space, social control, consumption, cultural memory and everyday objects. Mother Mall (1996) was a large modular sculpture that resembled a quasi-organic space vessel or shopping mall model (including Muzak accompaniment) and referenced science-fiction and suburban dystopias. It was set on a ring of sawhorses surrounded by wall works appropriating banal, consumer-culture ephemera that critic Peter Frank deemed "suffused with the relentless cheesiness and ravenous narcissism of [various] verbal symptoms of our alienated stupefaction."

Cluster 38 (1997) and Stepped Density (1999–2001) reworked the ergonomics of fast-food furniture design and rules of public space, creating what The Washington Post called "Pop-artish, tongue-in-cheek" sculptures of geometric rigor and high finish "hovering in a perfect middle ground between high formalist aesthetics and low commercial culture." What Should a Museum Sound Like? (2010, Whitney Biennial) presented a digitally fabricated, sound-equipped museum sculpture playing an actor's recording of text by the museum's architect, Marcel Breuer, distorted with sounds created by transcoding the site's floor plans and drawings with a sound design program.

In 2025, Schafer presented "Forum" (Phase Gallery), a solo exhibition of immersive environments merging sound, sculpture and visual elements. Referencing ancient Roman architecture (in the installations Pantheon and Colosseum), the show examined how contemporary social structures are shaped by coded signs, corporate spectacle and institutional influence.

David Schafer, Pastoral Mirage, multi-site installation, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, painted steel, aluminum, cables, turnbuckles and hardware, nylon; 23' x 8' x 8'; 1993; installation view. Public projects Schafer's early public art commissions include Model Q (1989, Chicago), Altered Sites (1988, Philadelphia), Plaza of the First Reader (1988, Brooklyn) and New Century Trellis (1993, MetroTech Center, Brooklyn). Liberty Prop (1991, in collaboration with architect Jeffrey Cole) was a gazebo-like installation in City Hall Park, a site of contemporary and Revolutionary-period demonstrations, including the first Sons of Liberty "Liberty Pole" display. Challenging in their 19th-century form and bold, utilitarian design—as opposed to typical, decorative signage—the signs sought to restore the hidden narratives in Olmsted's vision, revealing the gap between his lofty intentions and present-day park usage.

David Schafer, Separate United Forms, cast bronze, concrete, in-ground lighting sculptures; 7.5' x 12.5'; platform: 20' x 40'; 2009. Schafer's later public works demonstrate a growing embrace of technology, sampling culture and sound. For Separated United Forms (2009, Huntington Hospital, Pasadena), he used a hand-held, 3D body scanner to appropriate forms from a Henry Moore marble work, Reclining Form (1966), which were digitally reconfigured and remixed into a final, biomorphic image that was cast without a physical prototype as a monumental pair of 1,500-pound bronze sculptures. In addition to live events, it featured campus delivery trucks outfitted with amplified speakers and informative signage, each playing a dedicated, repeated Schoenberg composition and intersecting randomly on indeterminant routes to create John Cage-like chance moments of sound.

In 2025, Schafer created the public work, Reflected Terrain, a 101-foot-long, polished stainless steel contour line representing the topography of a portion of the San Gabriel mountains, a commission for Artists and Makers Studios in San Gabriel Valley, CA.

Sound works and performances Schafer has also produced electronic noise and processed recordings, live signal manipulation, programming events and live sound performance, using the moniker of DSE from 2009 to 2017.

Schafer has performed sound at LACE, Human Resources and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, and Printed Matter, Inc., Silent Barn, The Invisible Dog Art Center and Roulette in New York, among other venues. His sound performance for the 2010 Whitney Biennial is included in the book Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011), and his sound works have been included in curated radio programs in Lisbon, Paris, Glasgow, and Berlin.

Recognition Schafer has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2018),