David Barr
American, 1939 - 2015#2, 1986
Not on view
Polychromed steel
Dimensions81 × 52 × 60 in.
Gift of the Friends of Modern Art, 1990.11
An architectural designer sculptor, David Barr was born in a suburb on the east side of Detroit. He took no art classes until he went to college at Wayne State University, but had made mixed-media pieces at home. Barr was drawn to the concepts of Constructivism and the fact that machines could be liberating as well as enslaving. He was fascinated with the idea that artists could work with the same materials and ideas as common laborers and in this way, art could be democratic—that it could be understood and explained in a language most people understood. A major influence on his thinking was Charles Biederman, a Constructivist painter and sculptor of structural reliefs.
