David Griggs
About the Artist
David Griggs is a Denver-based artist who has completed over 50 commissioned works of art throughout the United States. Primarily a designer of site-responsive Public Art, he has also participated in over a dozen Master Planning and Design Team projects, including the Team for Hope, Arkansas, President Bill Clinton’s birthplace. His work is installation-based, engaging the viewer with visual intimacy and physical interactivity. With a heightened sensitivity to the qualities of a site’s function and history, his work resonates with the character of its site. Griggs’ work is site-integrated, an approach that utilizes the ability of a site to compliment a work of art both in meaning and in impact. This may include work specific to the architecture and other formal elements of the site, or responsive to other factors, whether they are social, cultural, environmental or historical. At the core of Griggs’ work is a playful regard for formal qualities, an appreciation for functional need, and an awareness of social context. His work embraces the character of a situation and embodies the spirit of a site. While engaging the viewer with physical and formal elements, his work aspires for that act of recognition when truth is found in humor, when identity and meaning are found in metaphor.
Griggs has lived and worked in Denver for over 35 years. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder with a Masters Degree in Fine Arts. He has worked in many capacities in the arts, including gallery manager, museum preparator, and studio artist. For the last 25 years he has been self-employed as a Public Artist, designing and building work for Percent For Art, Public Art, and Private commissions. Recent commissions include projects for Anchorage, Boulder, Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Madison, Santa Fe, Stockton, Toronto, and Washington. Increasingly he has become involved in projects that require not only designing and building Public Art, but also the planning, strategizing and advocating for Public Art involvement. He was a consultant for the design and integration of artwork into Denver’s Light Rail system for the West Corridor, the first of the “Fastracks” lines to be built. Other consultancy positions have included projects for Denver Housing Authority and for Lowry Redevelopment.