David Black’s Restless Curiosity: The Central Ohio Artist Left His Mark Through Sculpture

At 5 years old, in the middle of a snowball fight with his sisters, David Black fell out of a neighbor’s tree, dropping 16 feet onto the granite ground in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The fall wreaked havoc on his insides, but thanks to the ingenuity of a young doctor, Black survived. 

The near-death experience stayed with him like a recurring nightmare and triggered something deep within Black—an ever-present, existential reminder that life is both perilous and precious. Black made the most of his time on Earth, creating dozens of huge sculptures in public spaces across Ohio and around the world. On Sept. 5, he died at age 95 in his longtime Grandview home, surrounded by his children and thousands of art books that captivated him daily in recent years, even as he lived with the effects of dementia. 

Black spent much of his life creating, but he could have gone many directions. Growing up on Cape Ann, he excelled in academics, becoming valedictorian of Gloucester High School’s 1946 class and earning a scholarship to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In the summers, Black worked as a lifeguard at Wingaersheek Beach, where he met sculptor George Aarons, who had a studio nearby. The encounter seeded the idea of artist as an occupation.  

But Black came to sculpture slowly, initially studying physics at Wesleyan and earning Phi Beta Kappa honors. Halfway through college, he switched to an art major, much to the disappointment of his physics professors, who told him he could be an artist on Sundays. “I said I would be a Sunday physicist,” Black recounted in a 2001 documentary, Black on White.  

During the Korean War, Black served in the Army in South Carolina (alongside artist Jasper Johns) and then in Indiana, where he met and married Karlita Kunz in 1953; the couple had two children, Eric and Margo. Black earned his MFA from Indiana University in 1954 and that same year came to Ohio State to teach.  In his own practice, he focused on pottery, winning regional and national awards for his work before shifting to ceramic sculptures, and then bronze sculptures, which he pursued further in 1962 when a Fulbright scholarship allowed Black to study Etruscan art in Florence, Italy.   

Black’s travels also took him and his family to Mexico, which inspired him to begin designing wall-hangings. “His curiosity was contagious,” says Black’s son, Eric, a documentary filmmaker. “We could hardly wait for the next adventure.”  

From ceramic, bronze and wool, Black shifted to plastic, creating sculptures out of Plexiglas and epoxy resin. The work led to a commissioned installation, “Skypiece,” for the courtyard of Berlin, Germany’s esteemed museum for modern art, the Neue Nationalgalerie, in 1972. Featuring transparent, circular designs mounted on stainless steel, the monumental sculpture radiates elegance even as it evokes industry; art critic Donald Kuspit recently called “Skypiece” “the greatest plastic sculpture ever made.” 

Black’s groundbreaking work with plastic put him on the map globally, yet he pivoted again, making large, templelike structures he referred to as “spirit houses” out of aluminum, which he often painted white—a reference not only to sacredness, but to the New England buildings, beaches and foam-capped waves of his childhood. Through a combination of commissions and competitions, over 40 of Black’s metal sculptures found homes in Japan and all over the United States, including more than a dozen in Ohio. In the 1980s, Port Columbus suspended Black’s 1-ton “Airfold” sculpture over the airport’s main concourse, and Ohio State commissioned Black’s jagged “Breaker” sculpture for a spot near Mershon Auditorium (it now lives at the corner of Ackerman and Olentangy River roads). In the ’90s and 2000s, Black completed sculptures in Toledo, Cleveland and Zanesville, along with a high-profile installation in downtown Dayton: “Flyover,” a 150-foot-long piece memorializing the Wright Brothers’ first flight. He made works for universities such as Miami, Case Western Reserve, Youngstown State and Wright State, whose students affectionately refer to Black’s 1998 sculpture, “Turning Points,” as BART: Big Artsy Red Thing. 

These public sculptures removed Black from a gallery system he came to despise after growing disillusioned with the commercialization of art. Though abstract, and not always initially embraced, Black’s sculptures, which he described as “proto-architecture,” were meant to be enjoyed without barriers; he often included benches in the pieces to welcome interaction. The large sculptures are best experienced from multiple angles as viewers walk in and around the structures—the backdrop of blue sky framing the angles and twists and loops, the sun casting geometric shadows all around. Critics have described these works as “kinetic without movement.” “You have to bring the piece together in your mind,” Eric Black says. “It's incomplete without the viewer.” 

In 2021, Black’s work was venerated in Europe and incinerated in his hometown: Berlin’s New National Gallery reinstalled the newly restored “Skypiece” in July, and a few months earlier, fire from an explosion at Columbus’ Yenkin-Majestic Paint Corp. spread to a building next door and destroyed more than half of Black’s personal collection. 

Kuspit has called Black “unequivocally the most important” artist making works meant for public space, yet Black, who retired from Ohio State in 1984 but continued teaching as emeritus professor for several years, is arguably honored more elsewhere than he is in his hometown. The Columbus Museum of Art holds only two early ceramic pieces by Black in its collection.  

Now, Black’s son is sorting through what remains of his father’s art in hopes of exhibiting the work at major institutions and one day opening a museum in Gloucester. “Even as a little kid, it seemed like my father saw a distant point, like a lighthouse on a far shore,” Eric says. “He might have changed tack, to use a nautical term, but he knew exactly where he was going.” 

This story is from the December 2023 issue of Columbus Monthly.