Prof. David Paton

Short Biography:

David Paton is an Associate Professor and past (2004 – 2009) head of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa where he teaches Drawing and Studio Practice at all undergraduate levels. He also supervises postgraduate students’ studies, five of whom have received the prestigious Chancellor’s Medal for Meritorious Postgraduate Study. He received his MAFA at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2001 with a dissertation titled South African Artists’ Books and Book-objects Since 1960 and his PhD by Existing Published or Creative Work, awarded by Viva Voce and without any alteration or addition to the thesis, from the University of Sunderland, UK in 2019. David has curated numerous exhibitions of the book arts in South Africa. In 2017, he headed the project team that hosted the Booknesses exhibitions – showcasing both the renowned Jack Ginsberg Collection of international artists’ books as well as South African book art – and an international colloquium at the University of Johannesburg in 2017. In 2019, David curated Samplings: South African Artists’ Books to inaugurate the Jack Ginsberg Center for Book Art (JGCBA, Wits Art Museum), Wits University. David has authored numerous catalogues of artist’s book exhibitions, some of which are to be found in prestigious library collections such as the National Art Library, London, Oxford University and the University of London; Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford and Princeton Universities, the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, USA. He has also published a number of articles and chapters on the book arts in local and international journals and publications. His artist’s book Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking can be found in the collection of the Jack Ginsberg Center for Book Arts, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, the San Francisco Center for the Book, USA, the Templeman Library, Canterbury, UK and the von Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. David hosts the website Artists’ Books in South Africa which won the National Institute for Humanities and Social Science (NIHSS) 2018 award in the Digital Humanities. He is the recipient of the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship to New York in 1999 and again in 2017, when he presented a lecture at the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY. In 2019, he was invited to read conference papers in Berkeley, CA, USA and Bremen, Germany. David is the father of two sons.

CV: Access here

Recent Publications: