Obituaries

In Remembrance: David Pease Died on November 19 2018

David Pease, Street Professor Emeritus of Painting and dean of Yale School of Art from 1983 to 1996, died on November 19, 2018, in Guilford, Connecticut.

With bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Pease taught at Michigan State University, Tyler School of Art, and Temple University before coming to Yale in 1983, where he remained on faculty until retirement in 2000. During this time he also served as dean of the School of Art under four university presidents.

His work was shown in more than 250 exhibitions during his lifetime, and resides in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Whitney Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and others. He was a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the William A. Clark Award from the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

4 remembrances

  • Ronald E Jackson
    Ronald E Jackson , 10:43am August 01 2021 | Ico flag Flag as inappropriate

    My favorite teacher and friend at Tyler 1963-1967.David,rest in peace. Love, Ron Jackson

  • Bill White
    Bill White, 1:24pm October 15 2021 | Ico flag Flag as inappropriate

    David was my mentor and major Professor at Tyler when I was in grad school 1967 to 1969
    He had a significant influence on ideas about how vision and the Gestalt ideas of perception intertwined I found his criticism to be incisive and expressed in his personal tone of voice that had both authority and gentleness
    He believed in me as a professor after graduating and teaching at Indiana university then for 39 years at Hollins university in Virginia
    He visited us on one of his " journeys " that he translated into his coded pictures that could be "read" as timelines of his days on the road. His work was always demanding and asked for a curiosity about what was being represented and also how it was expressed
    I miss him

  • Andrea Gomez (Sharf)
    Andrea Gomez (Sharf), 9:00am January 15 2023 | Ico flag Flag as inappropriate

    I was a painting major during my 4 years at Tyler (68-72.) Somewhere along the line, animation had become one more way for me to paint. (This is not very radical now, hasn’t been for a while, but 1970 was a different time, Tyler a different place.) Knowing that Stella Elkins Tyler’s bedrooms, Tyler’s painting studios at the time, were no place for this and that the painting faculty might think I had done a deep dive into cartooning, I went to Mr. Pease, then Chair of the Painting, and told him I must “un-declare” my major. He asked why and then, said, “Where will you go? You’ll be an orphan in the storm. Stay here.” In the end, my senior review was nothing but films, and the painting Department simply accepted my strange submissions.

  • Andrea Gomez(Sharf)
    Andrea Gomez(Sharf), 9:03am January 15 2023 | Ico flag Flag as inappropriate

    Mr. Pease had the quality that all wise teachers have: the ability to get out of their heads and enter the students’ to understand the person’s experiment and evaluate how well it was attempted and possibly achieved. He was not a preacher but a teacher. More, he was a kind man and what he conveyed when I felt lost were possibly the kindest words ever said to me. I will remember them and him until I no longer can.

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