CCA News
David Ireland, CCA Alumnus and Capp Street Project Founder, Dies at 78
Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
We are sad to report that one of CCA's most illustrious alumni, David Ireland, died on Sunday.
Ireland was born on August 25, 1930, in Bellingham, Washington. He studied printmaking and industrial arts at CCA, receiving a BFA in 1953, then spent two years in the army. After leaving the army he traveled around Europe, working as an illustrator, and led safaris in Africa. In the 1970s he returned to the United States and completed an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. He received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from CCA in 1991.
In 1975 he bought his now-famous house at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco. For decades he offered weekly public tours of it as a kind of sculpture in progress. It was an 1886 Victorian, quite run down, and he spent decades working on it—both fixing it up and stripping it down. He removed a hundred years' accumulation of paint, wallpaper, and plaster, and at the same time collected fragments and traces of the previous owners into glass jars. Ireland applied some of these same processes to the traces of his own existence, for instance collecting hair clippings and toilet paper rolls, and organizing and displaying them in ways that were beautiful, clever, and subtle.
Ireland also purchased and transformed a second house at 65 Capp Street (in 1979), which was subsequently purchased by CCA board member Ann Hatch; the two of them cofounded the Capp Street Project artist residency program there in 1983. The program became part of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in 1998 and is now housed on the CCA campus.
Hatch says, "David was an artist who enormously influenced both students and other artists. 500 Capp was the place to go and meeting David made artists feel connected and appreciated. He was generous and made people think about what the fabric of art could be. His participation in Capp Street Project, as a friend, made a huge difference toward the program's success."
Ireland's house and many of his other projects appeared in a massive 30-year retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California in 2003–4. Titled The Way Things Are, it was accompanied by an extensive catalog with archival photographs of his life, art, and house. He worked not only in installation but also in the media of drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and assemblage. He also often used "non-art" materials such as old brooms, bent wire, dirt, talcum, and cement. He was guided by Zen thought and postmodern aesthetics, working outside conventional disciplines to draw attention to the beauty and poetry of everyday things.
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown said at the time of the retrospective, "David Ireland is one of this country's most influential conceptual artists, an artist of the enigmatic commonplace whose provocative, idiosyncratic art is like a Zen koan. He makes us see that art is all around us and we need only to stop and look."
One of Ireland's guiding principles, "You can't make art by making art," reflected his belief that the best works of art do not call attention to themselves as such. "Ideally my work has a visual presence that makes it seem like part of a usual, everyday situation. I like the feeling that nothing's been designed, that you can't tell where the art stops and starts."
Condolences should be addressed to the artist's sister, Judith Ireland, 3574 22nd Street, San Francisco, CA 94114. A public memorial is being planned. Once a date has been set it will be announced in the San Francisco Chronicle.
View the KQED Spark profile of David Ireland, titled "The Grey Eminences."
Read Ireland's obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle.