David Askevold

Nova Scotia artist David Askevold (1940-2008) is recognized as a key contributor to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art. His work was included in the seminal exhibition Information at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1970 that cemented conceptualism as a movement. He quickly gained a reputation as one of the most influential conceptual artists in Canada, with his work apearing in many of the genre's formative texts and exhibitions. During his forty-year career, Askevold remained at the vanguard of contemporary practice. Askevold was born in Conrad, Montana. After studying at the University of Montana, Brooklyn Museum Art School, and Kansas City Art Institute, he moved to Halifax in 1968 to lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. During the early 1970s, his famous Projects Class brought such artists as Sol LeWitt, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, and Lawrence Weiner to work with his students, focusing critical attention on his adopted city and on his own unorthodox approach to making art. This illustrated volume examines the various strains of Askevold's pioneering practice -- sculpture and installation, film and video, photo-text works and photography, and computer-generated imagery. David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East features essays by celebrated writer-curators Ray Cronin, Peggy Gale, Richard Hertz, and Irene Tsatsos as well as contributions from several of Askevold's contemporaries, including Aaron Brewer, Tony Oursler, and Mario Garcia Torres. The book accompanies an exhibition that opens at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and travels to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.