David and Nelle Dunlap

David and Nelle Dunlap, originally uploaded by Legion Arts.

I just spent the most wonderful week helping to install David Dunlap's exhibition at the CUE foundation, on 25th St. in between 10th and 11 avenues.

Nelle was there, and she is a lot like her father. She told us she has five blogs, including one just for outfits she is wearing. And that as a kid she used one of David's coffin sculptures as a clothes dresser. David and Nelle drove from Iowa together, and Nelle said she wrote a speech and song during the drive. Nelle also presented David's work at FIT on Tuesday (the fashion institute of technology).

Seeing David among all his work is humbling, and I am going to document it with photographs over the next month. All the work comes from a genuine and authentic place, and sometimes it crosses into the territory of being embarrassing, which is one easy way to recognize that it is art.

David repeatedly engages in a saint like act of public contrition, exposing himself in a way that makes him very vulnerable. For instance: making art about Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama while bringing up the US history of the KKK and cross burning, or his project to reclaim the Phlyfot (Swastika) from the Nazis back to its original meaning of ultimate goodness (it was used by the ancient Greeks, Persians, Hindus as a sign of peace, and complexity - sometimes it represented a labrinyth, it carries other spiritual signifiganes as well). A by-product of him doing these difficult things is that the other people can consider it privately. It's a big job, turning some of the evil symbols into spiritual light, and taking idealized figures and investing them with a complex saint-hood.

One other note, the show was curated by artists and gallerists Scott and Tyson Reeder who run the General Store gallery in Milwaukee Wisconsin. Scott is going to have some paintings up at the Saatchi gallery in London sometime soon too.