FIRST FRIDAY RECEPTION | David Lester Learn: Entanglements and Urban Archaeology

March 6, 2026 | Reception 5–8pm

This exhibition presents David Lester Learn’s Urban Archaeology sculptures (1980s–1990s) alongside his recent Entanglements paintings (2009–present), staging a dialogue for the first time between two important series and including many works that have never been shown before. 

Learn began his practice of “urban archaeology” in New York City in the early 1980s, scavenging discarded materials and objects from streets and warehouses and transforming them into otherworldly sculptural assemblages. After decades in New York and then Italy, he moved to South Bend in 2009, where he turned to painting vibrant, semi-abstract compositions inspired by the visual chaos, or “entanglements,” of nature as seen from his backyard. 

The disparate approach to materials, aesthetics, and sources of inspiration that separates the series is immediately apparent. Yet across the gallery, shapes, colors, textures, and patterns recur and reverberate, revealing unexpected connections between objects and suggesting through lines spanning nearly fifty years of work.