Dominic Chambers (b. 1993 St. Louis, MO; lives and works in New Haven, CT) creates vibrant paintings that engage color-field painting, gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, leisure, and reflection. Interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, he sees painting as a critical and intellectual endeavor. Chambers draws inspiration from literature, especially Magical Realism and the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly The Souls of Black Folk and its theme of the veil. References to the veil appear throughout his work, in swaths of color that obscure figures or in the recurring raindrop motif.
Chambers sees color as a protagonist, and his manipulation of contrasting colors gives his work an electric charge. In his series Leave Room for the Wind, he situates subjects in vivid, shifting dreamscapes and richly-hued open fields saturated in red, yellow, and blue. Figures flying kites appear throughout these scenes, a domestic activity pursued for its own sake. In these works and throughout his oeuvre, Chambers proposes that enjoyment, stillness, and wonder can act as a gateway to private life and that leisure and recreation are critical to replenishing interiority.
Chambers received his
B.F.A from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016, and his M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 2019. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2023) and Lehmann Maupin, New York (2022). He has also been featured in major group exhibitions such as When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2022), and Fire Figure Fantasy at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022). Chambers’ works are in public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
He is the recipient of the Robert Reed Drawing Scholarship from Yale University and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from the Yale Norfolk School of Art.