David Rathman

Born 1958, Choteau, Montana

David Rathman grew up with eight siblings in a small Montana prairie town that butts up against the Rocky Mountains. It was a place, he remembers, where the twelve-year-old “cowboy kids” would drive to school in their pickup trucks, Copenhagen tobacco stuffed into their back pockets.¹ A decade out of art school, in the early 1990s, Rathman realized that his “authentic” subjects were the things pivotal to him as a boy: westerns, cowboys, sports, race cars. His career took off in 2000 with his cowboy figures (cat. nos. 249–252 ), often based on scenes from big-screen westerns like For a Few Dollars More and The Ballad of Cable Hogue. He shot a Polaroid of the TV screen as he watched and rewatched, then simplified his figures and silhouetted them in a spare landscape. For Rathman, whose father was an elementary school principal, the text he often adds to an image is as important as the image itself. “It’s a love of wordplay, it’s a love of writing—always loving books and writing and dialogue,” he has said. After finishing a piece, he searches the notebooks in which he records overheard conversation, movie dialogue, and lyrics for a line that will produce the right funny, melancholy, or disarming twist. His sports images—Rathman was a serious wrestler in high school—are based on photos he takes at small-town football games, demolition derbies, and other events. He returned to his old formula for the 2013 hockey etchings he completed at Highpoint, this time basing his imagery on screen grabs from games he watched on YouTube. He studied film footage to make a 2009 series based on the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. His medium was watercolor and ink.

Rathman spent two years at Montana State University in Bozeman before he enrolled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, graduating with a BFA in printmaking in 1982. He has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation (2000, 1993), Bush Foundation (1992), and Jerome Foundation (1989, 1986), in addition to a 1999 Minnesota Book Award for his artist’s book Roar Shocks (1998). His work has been shown in “Somewhere Between” (2016), Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis; “David Rathman: Stand by Your Accidents” (2013–14), Rochester Art Center, Minnesota, and Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; “The Old, Weird America” (2008–10), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and other venues; “Dialogues: Amy Cutler/David Rathman” (2002), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and other shows in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Milan, Berlin, and Santa Monica, Culver City, and Ojai, California. Rathman lives in Minneapolis.

—Marla J. Kinney