David C. Driskell (June 7, 1931 – April 1, 2020) was an American artist, scholar and curator recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study.

[5] When David Driskell was five years old, he moved with his family to Appalachia in western North Carolina, where he attended segregated elementary and high schools.

[6] Art was already embedded in his family life before he went to college; his father created paintings and drawings on religious themes, his mother made quilts and baskets, and his grandfather was a sculptor.

[1] Driskell was influenced by James V. Herring, another of his professors at Howard, and Mary Beattie Brady, the director of the Harmon Foundation, an organization that collected work by African Americans.

[9] After teaching for several years at Talladega College in Alabama, Driskell went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from Catholic University in 1962.

He was a rigorous scholar and due to his careful cataloging of African-American works he began creating the archive and context for research into black art.

[13][1] Driskell had a long relationship with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture which began in 1953, the year he attended as a participant of the program.

[13][18] He curated more than 35 exhibitions of work by black artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Elizabeth Catlett.

The subject matter of his work ranges from portraits of jazz singers, African gods and rituals, urban life, to landscapes around his summer home in Maine.

His oeuvre reflects, "his openness to the times he is living in and his immediate circumstances, whether in his neighborhood or in nature," John Yao writes for Hyperallergic on the occasion of his 2019 solo exhibition at DC Moore Gallery.

[20] The exhibition was planned to include more than 60 artworks, gathered from museums, private collections, and Driskell's estate, and representing his studio work from the 1950s to the 2000s.

[4] In fall 2020, the Driskell Center presented a virtual exhibition, The David C. Driskell Papers, which included digitized reproductions of over 110 items, drawn from the more than 50,000 items in the collection overall, among them journal entries, writings, curatorial notes, exhibition catalogues, photographs, audio and video material, and ephemera.