Artist

David Levinthal

born San Francisco, CA 1949
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Courtesy of David Levinthal. Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Also known as
  • David Lawrence Levinthal
Born
San Francisco, California, United States
Active in
  • New York, New York, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

David Levinthal was born in San Francisco in 1949 into a rapidly changing post-World War II American society. He earned a degree in management science from the MIT Sloan School of Management (1981), a master's degree in fine arts from Yale University (1973), and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University (1970). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1995 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990. Since 1972, he has worked with toy figures and tableaux in his artwork. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others. In 1997, the International Center for Photography in New York presented the first retrospective of his work titled David Levinthal: Work from 1977-1996. The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, organized the most recent retrospective, David Levinthal: War, Myth, Desire, in 2018. In 2019, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs to showcase seventy-four color photographs, created between 1984 and 2018, from two recent gifts to SAAM of more than four hundred photographs by the artist.

American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs (June 7, 2019-October 14, 2019)

Videos

Exhibitions

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American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs 
June 7, 2019October 14, 2019
Populated with toy cowboys and cavalry, Barbie dolls and baseball players, David Levinthal’s photographs reference iconic images and events that shaped postwar American society.

Related Posts

A photograph of a horse on it's back legs with a man next to it.
06/04/2019
Populated with toy cowboys and cavalry, Barbie dolls and baseball players, David Levinthal’s photographs reference iconic images and events that shaped postwar American society.
Blog author in front of the David Levinthal image of Roberto Clemente
07/09/2019
Anne Showalter, digital interpretation specialist at SAAM, reflects on David Levinthal's photo of Roberto Clemente, from the artist's baseball series.
A photograph of Anne Showalter in front of Superhighway.
Anne Showalter
Digital Interpretation Specialist
David Levinthals's photograph of 3 Barbies in bathing suits
08/02/2019
Gymnast Gabby Douglas on the deeper meaning of looking at (and being) a Barbie.
Shanti Boyle
Media - 2018.3.190 - SAAM-2018.3.190_1 - 134538
08/21/2019
What does the "Cowboy Code" have to do with David Levinthal's photographs?
Shanti Boyle
Media - 2018.3.71 - SAAM-2018.3.71_1 - 133830
10/09/2019
David Levinthal's photographs shine a light on the darkness of film noir.
Shanti Boyle