Dayton Castleman

Dayton Castleman is an American artist raised in New Orleans. His practice has focused on art in public spaces for the past 20 years and his creative work employs a wide range of media. His sculptures, paintings, installations, and performances have been presented in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Dundee, Scotland, and throughout the United States, including the International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, NJ; DePaul University Museum of Art, Chicago; Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago; The Ruth Page Center for Dance, Chicago; The University of Chicago; The Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; The MDW Fair, Chicago; Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Philadelphia; Gallery 400, Chicago; Governor’s Island, NY; Fort Smith Regional Art Museum; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; and Jennifer Norback Fine Art, Chicago. He has permanent large-scale works in Philadelphia; Brunswick, MD; and Bentonville, AR.

Dayton is Director of Creative Placemaking + Artist Lead at Verdant Studio, a woman-owned architecture firm based in Rogers, AR.

He earned his BA in Art from Belhaven University, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the recipient of an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, and an Artists 360 Individual Artist grant. He serves as chair of the Rogers Public Art Commission and chairs the Urban Land Institute NWA’s Art in Place program.

Castleman’s strategically crafted gallery-scaled work explores the ambiguities, contradictions, and wonders of visual perception, representation, symbol, and metaphor.

His paintings in the Thermostat series utilize the form and surface of the canvas as an opportunity for domestic camouflage, rather than decor. The paintings resist easy identification as artworks by hiding in plain sight within built environments, doubling down on their Duchampian humor by disguising the hand-crafted object as a mass produced utility, and decentering the artist, in effect, to anonymous producer. Installed as an ordinary object in its familiar space, each work utilizes the deceptive capacity of painting and sculpture to encourage a more vigilant examination of one’s surroundings.