David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies. He disassembles furniture, especially from his familial home in Harlem, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.
Shrobe (b.1974, Harlem, NY) holds an MFA (2013) and BFA (2009) in painting from Hunter College. He is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) and was a Joan Mitchell Artist Teaching Fellow. Shrobe has had solo exhibitions at moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA. His work is included in the traveling group exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage which originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN in 2023, is currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX through May 12, 2024, and travels to the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., from July 6–September 22, 2024. Other group exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; the Bronx Museum, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. Shrobe’s work will be included in the upcoming group exhibition When Langston Hughes Came to Town at the Nevada Museum of Art (2025-2026).
Shrobe’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Dean Collection; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; The Birmingham Museum of Art; The Block Museum at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Union College, Schenectady, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The University of Arizona Museum of Art, AZ; University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Collection, IL; and Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI. Shrobe lives and works in New York, NY.