David Kamm is an assistant professor of art and the gallery coordinator for visiting art exhibits.  He also assists in management of the Luther College Fine Arts Collection.  His primary teaching responsibilities are printmaking and foundations.  In the studio, he often uses his prints as raw material for the creation of collages and mixed-media pieces that explore relationships of our physical and spiritual natures through social and historic lenses.

David’s art has been included in over 130 group and solo exhibitions.  He has been a participant in a Fulbright Study Abroad project to Russia and also a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Virginia.  In 2004, he created a series of original woodblock prints for the book Marguerite Wildenhain: A Diary to Franz, compiled by Dean Schwarz and published by South Bear Press.  In 2007 he was an artist-in-residence at the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.  The work he created there is represented in Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate, a project sponsored by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana.  In 2008 he was a member of the Institute of Lutheran Scholars at Harvard University, where he began an extended series of studio works based on Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Shaw Memorial, located on Boston Common.  In addition to his studio work and teaching, he has presented at several sessions of national art conferences, including the College Art Association and FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education).  His article, “Riding the Light: Visual Thinking and the Constructive Mind,” was published in the March 2011 issue of Future Forward, the official on-line journal of Integrative Teaching International.

Teaching Philosophy

I’m not sure if art can actually be taught, but I know there is much about it that can be learned.  Art courses offer students opportunities to think creatively, to engage their bodies as well as their minds in academic pursuits, and to develop a productive work ethic that will inform and enrich any discipline.  In an educational environment, the art work students create must be about more than self-expression.  It must also demonstrate technical and conceptual growth, along with an awareness of how it relates to the larger world.  My role as an instructor is to help that occur.