David MacWilliam is an artist, educator and independent curator living in Vancouver, Canada. He has exhibited his paintings in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past forty years. He received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), and has an MA in Visual Arts from University of the Arts London. From 1988 to 2017, he taught visual art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, in Vancouver, Canada, where he is currently Professor Emeritus in the Audain Faculty of Art. He continues to develop a specific iconography of material abstraction and remains primarily concerned with the social role of art, the relationships between forms and colour, and painting as labour.
His art has been exhibited extensively in Canada and occasionally in Europe over the past 35 years. Some of these exhibitions include the Paris Biennale (1982), Vancouver Art Gallery's Art and Artists 1939-83 (1983), and most recently in the VAG's PAINT exhibition (2006/07). He had one person exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1984), and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1990) and the Galleria Panorama, Barcelona (1997), the Musee Regional de Rimouski in Quebec (1998) and Winchester Galleries, Victoria (2006, 2013).
He completed Kingsway Luminaires, a permanent public art installation commissioned by the City of Vancouver's Public Art Program as part of Mapping and Marking, artist-initiated projects for Vancouver 2010, which is his second public project using programmed full spectrum LED lights.
His book Unfolding (2012) includes reproductions of forty of his inkblot paintings along with essays by Winnipeg psychiatrist Dr. Jeanne Randolph and Canadian artist and art historian Robert Linsley.