Danville Chadbourne was born in 1949 in Bryan, Texas. He received a BFA in 1971 from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas and an MFA in 1973 from Texas Tech University in Lubbock. After teaching studio art and art history at the college level for 17 years at various institutions, Chadbourne quit teaching in 1989 to devote himself full-time to his art. He has exhibited extensively at both state and national levels, including more than 100 one-person exhibitions. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, and in publications such as Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics Monthly, and The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists (Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2016). He has participated in international residencies and exhibitions in India and Germany. Chadbourne has lived in San Antonio, Texas since 1979.
Primarily a sculptor in clay and wood, Chadbourne works in a range of materials in both two- and three-dimensional formats. Over the years he has created a complex body of work unified by a primal iconography. “My work is concerned with the evocation of spiritual or primal states. I use relatively simple sculptural images, sometimes static, like monuments, other times active, dynamic forms that suggest ritual usage. I use materials and processes that imply cultural attitudes that are harmonious with nature and the passage of time.” The overall effect is that of discovering an artifact that is evidently outside of our culture at one level, but reflects a kind of universal human consciousness, and the perception of our own personal existence. This anthropological quality emerges from a very personal and consistent formal, aesthetic and philosophical sense.