Horton-David

Office: Power Arts Center
Phone: 973-720-3837
Email: hortond@wpunj.edu
Office Hours:

Department: Art
Position: Professor

Area Specialization
Photography

Artist's Statement: “My work playfully explores the relation between illusion and fact—I relish the question of what is real and what is not?  The content of my work evolves from my personal interests in the history of science, mythology, archetypal psychology and spirituality. I play with the comic and am in awe of the cosmic. For me, making art is like making magic. “

Biographical summary: David Horton is an artist who loves to make things.  While he has seriously practiced photography as a fine art since 1962, Horton is significantly influenced by the Bauhaus experimental tradition, and works in any media that serves the needs of the project at hand. He makes photographs, things to photograph, things with photographs, three dimensional artist’s books, sculptural constructions and installations. In the last 15 years he as been at work developing a fictional character, creating the complete archive of “The Notebooks and Inventions of Dr. Thelonious Tinker, Cosmic Archeologist”.   In addition to making artifacts, appliances and notebook pages, he is currently drafting writings and drawings for a series of graphic novels on this character’s life and adventures.

David Horton has received three artist’s fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and two separate awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His work is in many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Fogg Art Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Gallery of American Art, as well as numerous private collections.  As a teacher with more than 45 years experience in higher education, he is dedicated to the idea of art education as a transformational process through the empowerment of one’s personal creativity.  He taught undergraduate and graduate photography at Pratt Institute for twenty years and is now Professor of Art at William Paterson University of New Jersey.