Background
Boxer was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica on March 17, 1946.
Boxer was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica on March 17, 1946.
David Boxer obtained a bachelor's degree in the histoiy of art at Cornell University in 1969 in Ithaca, New York. From there, he went to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he finished a master's and a doctorate in art. His doctoral dissertation studied the work of English painter Francis Bacon. The eclecticism of his art is in many ways related to his divergent career experiences.
Boxer was a medical technician for the Ministry of Health in Jamaica, which helps explain his extensive use of medical illustration and medical paraphernalia in his work, and also worked as a film editor and as a producer for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. He has incorporated his technical knowledge of video and television in his assemblages and collages a new and radical art of expression for Caribbean artists. He was a director and curator at the National Gallery in Jamaica from 1975 to 1990. In 1990, he became its director curator emeritus and chief curator.
Although he received limited artistic training from American painter Fred Mitchell, Boxer is mostly a self-taught artist. His academic training is in the field of art history and not in plastic arts per se. However, his knowledge and familiarity with the forms of art that he has studied have influenced his work: "My preparation as an artist has been limited almost exclusively to the study of the history of art and a great deal of looking at art, and it is this, a quite intense involvement with the art of Europe, of Africa, and of the New World, which has been a key element in the development of my work".
Boxer has had a large number of individual exhibitions. His work has been shown at the Artist Studio in Kingston, the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in Washington, D.C., and at the Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York. He has also participated in group exhibits at the Smithsonian Museum, the First Johannesburg Biennale, the First Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting, the Wilfredo Lam Biennale in Havana, and at the Bienal Intemacional de Sao Paulo, among others. He has received numerous prizes awards for his work such as the Centennial Medal of the Institute of Jamaica and the Gold Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica in 1995. In addition to being a renowned painter, he is also considered to be one of the foremost scholarly authorities in the work of Jamaican sculptor Edna Manley.
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Quotes from others about the person
Veerle Poupeye, who has collaborated with him in his scholarly and critical work, is the foremost expert on Boxer's art. According to Poupeye, Boxer has gone through several stages in his process of artistic production (Poupeye 1997,1999). During the early to mid-1960s his work was mostly autobiographical and soft and abstract. In the late 1960s, he started to produce politically charged paintings that explored conflict. An example of this, according to Poupeye, was his "Viet Madonna" (1967), inspired by the pain and carnage created by the use of Napalm in Vietnam. Then, during the 1970s, he made a sharp transition to neo-figurative art, which included the strong and often shocking use of violent and macabre elements within his paintings. The influence of British painter Francis Bacon, who used some of the same techniques and introduced suffering into his work, is evident in Boxer's work of this period. His paintings were motivated by many of the harsh social and political realities of the Caribbean. A recurrent trend in his paintings is the use of self-portraiture and surrealism. He blends himself into his realities and allows himself to suffer, albeit vicariously, those realities that he graphically depicts (Poupeye 1997, 1998).
Poupeye often uses the word "appropriation" to describe the work of this Jamaican artist. For instance, she identifies African and Renaissance art as major influences on his work. Boxer's compositions also show deep concerns for the social, economic, and political dynamics that permeate Jamaica and other Caribbean societies. He is genuinely concerned with issues of race, identity, oppression, genocide, cultural annihilation, colonization, imperialism, and poverty that so often affect the lives of people in that region and throughout the developing world (Poupeye 1997). An example of this is his collage "Fourth of July over Baghdad" (1981), based on what he felt was biased coverage by CNN of the Gulf War. His work is extremely symbolic, although there are always concrete signifiers that lead the viewer to his intended referent. His paintings and collages often borrow from other classic art works that the viewer may recognize.
