david willburn: canyons and plains

EXHIBITION DATES: september 30 - october 25, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, october 9, 5 - 8 pm

Closing RECEPTION: Saturday, october 25, 4 - 6 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Canyons and Plains, a solo exhibition by David Willburn in the Project Room. The exhibition will be on view in person and on Artsy from Tuesday, September 30 through Saturday, October 25, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 9, from 5 to 8 pm.

In Canyons and Plains, David Willburn draws on memories of the Texas Panhandle’s Palo Duro Canyon and the cultivated fields of the Southern Plains, translating their layered geologies and patterned expanses into textured abstractions. Using found materials—cardboard packaging, fabrics from disused clothing, painted muslin, and acrylic applied both directly and as paint skins—Willburn constructs surfaces that echo weathered rock strata, furrowed fields, and the shifting light of wide skies. The work does not depict these landscapes literally, but distills their rhythms, erosions, and repetitions into a personal visual language shaped by queer embodiment, memory, and place.

David Willburn (b. 1970, Fort Stockton, TX) is a visual artist whose work engages abstraction, queer domesticity, and regional mythologies through painting, textile, and mixed media. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), San Diego Art Institute, Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland), Dallas Contemporary, and Carneal Simmons Contemporary Art (Dallas). He lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas, where he teaches visual art at Dallas College: El Centro Campus.