David Brooks Hits the Pavement

Does a skater ever stop being a skater? Coasting along the streets of New York City on his skateboard, artist David Brooks maps his evolution from teen skater to ambitious sculptor, guiding us through pivotal moments of inspiration and seminal projects. Brooks brought his board with him when he moved to New York from rural Indiana in the mid-nineties for college, and used it to explore the city’s dynamic cultural landscape.

Discovering that the artifacts in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a functional aspect—each face embodying a specific individual—was an epiphany for Brooks as he began to understand art as something that could actively engage with the world at large. “When I realized what was behind them,” the artist says of the totems from Papua New Guinea, “it definitely shattered a particular preconceived idea of what art was.” That moment continues to significantly influence his work as the artist utilizes the historical and cultural connections of real world materials, like sprayable concrete in his 2010 installation Preserved Forest at MoMA PS1.

Just a few blocks away at The Explorers Club, a professional society for scientists and explorers, Brooks discusses how the race to the “great firsts” at the turn of the twentieth century reversed itself as we entered the twenty-first. Instead he says, we’ve begun to understand exploration as granular, with life’s beauty hiding in the details that often go overlooked. The artist applies this microscopic lens in the creation of Continuous Service Altered Daily (2016) at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, pulling apart a 1976 John Deere combine harvester into its hundreds of constituent parts to reveal the complex ecosystem of machinery within.

Though Brooks ultimately gave up on skating professionally to become an artist, the connection between skating and his creative process is still a strong one. Not only through his use of materials, but also in the artist’s creative adaptability to and complex understanding of the urban built environment. “There is an infinite number of variations of things one can do with a skateboard,” says the artist, “and it never quite ends so it will always keep going the more you put into it.”

Featuring Romantic-era piano music by composers Edvard Grieg (Lyric Pieces op.12 No. 2) and Franz Schubert (Impromptu No. 4 in A flat major, D. 899).

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