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David Alcantar
Born in Laredo TX, I remember that the street where I began growing up was a gravel road. I was moved to San Antonio at the age of 5, but not with a car of our own. I remember having to walk to school and feeling ashamed because I had done so, when everyone else arrived in their cars. Eventually, we got a car. a house, a lifestyle, and things that I never showed appreciation to my mother for how hard she worked to acquire them. These details are important because they shaped the kind of artist that I would become. I knew that I wanted to be an artist from a very young age, but the shame of my poverty, my skin color, the sound of my family name that people couldn’t pronounce, told me that I had to prove the worth of my presence within the community, including the art community. Perhaps, it should not be surprising, then, that I would become a conceptual artist, an adherent to ideas and ideals more than to surface appearances. While the majority of my time as a professional artist has been spent here in Texas, I am constantly hopeful for outside opportunities that broaden my learning and understanding of art’s role in the world to bring back to my community. We are living in contentious times, as we always do, and art has a function in understanding how we navigate an unpredictable world. Ultimately, I try to make hopeful art, even if barbed, that address questions about what it means to be a human and the role of art in our humanity.
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MORE ABOUT THIS ARTIST
Artist Type: Visual Arts: Mixed Media Artist, Painter, Sculptor, Woodworker
Artist Statement of Work
Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):
The fundamental focus of my work is and has been human negotiation behavior. The consequences of negotiated choices are further reaching than we tend to realize. Its unfolding over time impacts individual and collective narratives and relationships (between people, environments, and experiences) affecting what, in retrospect, we refer to as history. Understandably, people attempt achieving a balance in their navigation of the world between treating everything transactionally and acting based on instinct and intuition of what is the “right” choice to make. Negotiating is a universal activity that is constant. So while it may not be surprising that people aren’t always aware that they are negotiating, it is surprising that this universal behavior is not more actively taught in order to be more widely understood and done effectively. My work seeks to give visual form to negotiation behavior and the complex stories involved with it, as a means of individual and societal empowerment. My practice is founded in a belief that art, at its best, addresses what is common in human experience more than to what is particular, and relies heavily on research and critical analysis as the foundation of fabrication to foster substantive and inclusive dialogue with diverse audiences.
