Erik d'Azevedo (born 1948) is an American artist and poet who has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since the late 1970s.
When he was six years old, d'Azevedo traveled with his parents and sister to Liberia to live among the Gola people as his father conducted fieldwork for his dissertation.
[1] This experience, in addition to his father's ethnographic work on Native American Washoe culture of the Great Basin, had a profound impact on the development of Erik's worldview.
At CCAC, he studied with leading Bay Area artists such as Franklin Williams, Judith Linhares, Roy De Forest, Arthur Okamura and Jay DeFeo, whose emphasis on resisting "the hierarchy of material," resonated with him.
Expanding this idea, d'Azevedo believes that "chaos" is a direct reaction to the "rigidity and structure" of art history and its discourse.
[11] He taught painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, and was a guest lecturer in the literature department of St. Mary's College in Moraga, California earlier that year.