The Avalon Foundation is pleased to announce David C. Levy as the Jjudge for the Plein Air Easton 2019 competition.  Plein Air Easton is the largest and most prestigious outdoor painting competition in the United States. Each year Plein Air Easton chooses a single person to evaluate hundreds of slides from plein air painters around the world and select the 58 artists who compete in Easton in July. This person becomes the single judge for the event in the following year. Relying on a single judge ensures a clear and new curatorial perspective from year to year and has led to the elevation of fresh talent not just for Easton but the larger plein air movement.  

The son of artists Edgar Levy and Lucille Corcos and godson of sculptors David Smith and Dorothy Dehner, David Levy grew up in the midst of the creative community that moved the world’s art capital from Europe to New York during the seminal years of the late 1940s and early ‘50s. An internationally known and highly respected arts professional, he is an artist/designer, educator, museum director, art historian and musician.

Dr. Levy served for 19 years as the CEO of the Parsons School of Design, transforming the school from a small, struggling, non-degree-granting trade school into one of the largest and most diversified visual arts colleges in the United States. He served as President and Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design. Over his 14-year tenure, Levy rebuilt both the museum and its college of art, mounting more than 300 exhibitions and expanding the museum’s 1990 attendance of 80,000 to just under one million by 2004.  In 2005, Levy began a consulting relationship with Cambridge Information Group (CIG) and, in 2007, became President of its Education Group and of its graduate school, Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Other accomplishments include the creation of The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, co-founding the Delaware College of Art & Design and Bach to Rock, a chain of music schools with an innovative curriculum based on the formation of small bands.

It is fair to say that David Levy has lived his life in the eye of the modernist storm that transformed the American art world. Yet, as an artist Levy cares deeply about the elements that make great plein air paintings.  An important influence on Levy’s aesthetic development was his long collaboration with the brilliant graphic artist and Art Director’s Hall of Fame laureate, Cipe Pineles, with whom he designed hundreds of books and other publications. Together they won numerous awards in recognition of their design excellence and creative innovation. Levy credits this experience and Pineles’ guidance with the refinement of his eye for balance, color and composition and for a fastidiousness about these relationships in both two- and three-dimensional work.