David Underwood

David Underwood’s mixed-media, photographic artwork expands the language of still photography beyond the limitations of single-frame imagery and makes significant contributions to the historical continuum of mixed-media and image-text work. Underwood combines original photographs with text, drawing, painting, collage, and unique presentation methods. These assemblages often include photographs the artist has photographed many miles or perhaps many years apart and the reasons for the combinations and juxtapositions include both issues of content and the formal qualities of aesthetics. Underwood uses multiple photo methods, including analog film in various formats and silver gelatin darkroom prints, digital methods, and antique/alternative methods such as cyanotype and liquid emulsions. 

Underwood’s mixed-media artworks and assemblages are included in the permanent collections of 16 art museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Asheville Art Museum, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Underwood has held 35 solo exhibitions and has work featured in more than 150 group exhibitions in America and Europe. He has photographed in 49 states of the USA, in 11 foreign countries, and in more than 150 national parks and monuments.

Underwood was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, but has spent his professional life in the American South. He earned his BA in Photography from Carson-Newman College (now University), in East Tennessee. He earned his MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University in 1990, and was recruited the same year to teach back at his undergraduate alma mater. He is now Professor of Art and Director of Exhibitions at Carson-Newman University, where he has taught 22 different Art & Photography courses and directed more than 350 exhibitions of work by guest artists and the university’s students. He is married to the poet and writer Susan O’Dell Underwood.