David Schafer

Who is David Schafer?

David Schafer is an American visual artist and sound artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He attended Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri from 1973–75, received a B.A. from the University of Missouri, Kansas City in 1979 and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Texas, Austin in 1983.

Schafer works across multiple platforms of production including collaborations with architects, graphic designers, voice actors, digital engineers, fabricators, and sound studios. Schafer’s work is driven by a wide range of theoretical and personal references, which manifests mostly around the idea of site, language, and the built environment. Appropriating from the vocabulary and motifs of Modernism, and an array of idiosyncratic subjects from popular culture and theory, Schafer develops projects that are sculptural as well as text, graphic, and sound based. Schafer’s work intertwines language with architectural form as a critical exercise of spatial grammar and narrative structures.