David Levinthal. Between Fantasy and Reality

David Levinthal working on the diorama for his “Wild West” series, ca. 2019.

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David Levinthal was born in 1949 in San Francisco. He grew up watching television and recalls that most shows in the 1950s were Westerns, producing what the artist describes as a faux history “about a West that never was but will always be.”¹ Despite living in the West, John Wayne movies shaped Levinthal’s memory of it—the very images he’d been raised on were not only fake but insidiously coercive, defining and perpetuating pop culture’s narrowly defined ideals and stereotypes. Levinthal uses photography and toys like miniature landscapes, tiny dolls, and model sets to create imaginative worlds that explore the constructed nature of memory through facsimile, both in material and pictorial form.