David Park’s Studio, site Plaque

David Park’s Studio, site

DOWNTOWN

2025 Addison Street Map View

BERKELEY HISTORY

SITE OF DAVID PARK’S STUDIO

In the 1940s, painter David Park (1911–1960) had a studio in a brick building that once occupied this site. Despite a well-received exhibition of his abstract expressionist works at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1948, Park rejected abstraction and took many of his paintings of the previous three years to the city dump. Discovering a new freedom in “the natural development of the painting,” Park began creating richly colored and textured works depicting the human figure and scenes from everyday life. In his shift from abstraction lay the origin of what subsequently came to be known as the Bay Area Figurative style. Soon adapted by fellow Berkeley painters Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and others, this style became an important West Coast postwar indigenous school of art.

Berkeley Historical Plaque Project
2003


  • Peet's Theater, site of the David Park Studio plaque, photo George O. Petty (2023).

  • David Park Studio Plaque, photo George O. Petty (2023).

  • Park family residence (1952–1955), 2527 Piedmont Ave. (upstairs), photo (2012) R. Kehlmann.

  • David Park (late 1940's), courtesy David Park Estate.

Photo credit abbreviations:
BAHA: Berkeley Architectural Heritage Assn.
BHS: Berkeley Historical Society