Through the Looking Glass
July 13 – August 19, 2022
David Hilliard's large-scale, multi-paneled, color photographs present complex narratives exploring a range of themes and situations, from quiet moments of contemplation to scenes of heightened drama. Documenting his life and the lives of those around him, each work comprises a number of images that employ slightly different focal points, offering multiple perspectives of a single scene. Hilliard takes the personal and familiar and manipulates them to provide a commentary on larger issues such as masculinity, coming of age, sexuality, and spirituality; striking a balance between autobiography and fiction.
Hilliard has photographed his father on numerous occasions, and these works exemplify the artist’s ability to fuse fact with fiction. In the triptych Rock Bottom (2008), we see Hilliard’s father standing in a lake on the left panel, and Hilliard himself in the right panel, while the middle panel contains a view across the lake. The work simultaneously alludes to Hilliard’s relationship with his father while also offering a more general visualization of the process of aging. The expanse of water that separates the two men divides them both visually and metaphorically, illustrating the emotional and generational distance between them.
Born in 1964 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Hilliard lives and works in Boston. He received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1992, and his MFA from Yale University in 1994. His work has been exhibited in numerous institutions including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Kemper Art Museum, St Louis; Miami Art Museum; Addison Museum of American Art, Andover; Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Hilliard’s work is represented in many public collections including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Hilliard was the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and he was awarded the Bok Center Award for Excellence in Teaching by Harvard University in 2012. He has been a visiting lecturer at numerous schools, including Harvard University; Dartmouth College; Art Institute of Boston; and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design.
May 11 - July 8, 2018
Chosen Family: David Hilliard
David Hilliard has been photographing his life on the East Coast and elsewhere for over twenty years. Through cinematic, multi-image panoramas he is often noted for his nuanced photographic storytelling. His unique method combines both the still, singular moment with the movement and perspective only achievable through the passage of time. These decades of work also reveal his own shifting constructions of home, masculinity, desire, and family. Chosen Family brings together works made between 1993 and 2018 to explore these various positionings within three worlds: his liberal father’s gritty New England life, his conservative mother’s evangelical world in southwest Florida, and the queer families he has created throughout the country, but primarily in his own homes in Massachusetts and Maine.
Work by David Hilliard and Rachel Perry is included in Stocked: Contemporary Art from the Grocery Aisles, at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, on view through April 14, 2013. The exhibition presents work of contemporary artists who use the grocery store and consumption as their subject and will travel the United States following its Ulrich debut.
Works by David Hilliard will feature in the upcoming exhibition Do or Die: The Human Condition in Painting and Photography at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Teutloff Collection in Dresden, Germany, from September 21, 2012 – April 7, 2013. Hilliard's work was recently in Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography at the Aperture Foundation Gallery. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by MOCA and produced by Aperture Foundation.
Gallery artists Mitch Epstein, David Hilliard, Kenneth Josephson, Laura Letinsky and Hellen van Meene are all included in Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection, a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, on display through June 19, 2011. The exhibition also features works by Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Vik Muniz, and Richard Misrach, among others.
David Hilliard was selected as the Dartmouth College Artist-in-Residence for Winter/Spring 2010. Begun in 1932, the Artist-in-Residence Program hosts three artists of distinction per year, chosen by a Studio Art faculty committee. An exhibition of Hilliard's work is on display in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery through May 2, 2010.
