David MacWilliam is an artist living in Vancouver, Canada.
He has been active in the Vancouver art community both as an artist and a teacher since 1980. Since 1987, he has been teaching painting and digital visual arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, in Vancouver, Canada, where he is currently Dean of the Faculty of Visual Art + Material Practice.
His work has been exhibited extensively in Canada and occasionally in Europe over the past 30 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).
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 aspects of beauty and aesthetics that are determining qualities of life. His current research focuses on observable, real-time coloured light events and environments in public settings.
He recently 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.