David Haskell

David Haskell (b. 1979)

Born in 1979, David Haskell grew up in New York City and Connecticut. He first studied ceramic wheel throwing as a young adult and returned to it 15 years later. In the interim Haskell received his BA from Yale University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. He was a Truman Scholar class of 2000 and a member of the inaugural Gates Cambridge Scholarship in 2001. While studying architectural history at Cambridge University, Haskell founded Topic Magazine and brought it to New York City, where he edited it for five years. He was the founding Executive Director of the Forum for Urban Design (now called the Urban Design Forum), and he co-founded Kings County Distillery, New York City’s oldest and largest whiskey distillery. Haskell has worked as an editor at New York Magazine since 2007, and has served as Editor in Chief since 2019, during which time the magazine has won five National Magazine Awards and been a finalist for an additional 30. Haskell was named to Adweek’s “Hot List” as Publishing Editor of the Year in 2021, and the magazine was named Hottest Magazine of the Year under his leadership in 2019, 2022, and 2024.

When Haskell returned to wheel throwing in 2013, he studied under Mark Davies in New York City. He soon became a member of Sculpture Space ceramics studio in Long Island City, then shared a studio with the artist Jesse Shaw, and now occupies his own studio in the historic Gatehouses of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Haskell approaches his art as an exploration of the natural world, beginning with wheel-thrown pieces that he then combines and manipulates to create singular forms. Several years ago he started looking at the relationship between plants and clay, both functionally and formally. He produced a series of pots each inspired by a succulent he’d collected, with the aim of heightening the plant’s particular expressiveness. This resulted in his 2015 show “Psychotic Plants” at Coming Soon in New York, followed by two more shows there in 2016 and 2017.

More recently, Haskell has been creating abstract ceramic sculptures. No longer relying on functionality, these sculptures still make reference to the natural world directly or implicitly, alluding both in form and texture to gravity, tides and weather. Among these are rock-like sculptures that indeed seem to have weathered the elements, as well as “assemblage sculptures” - wheel-thrown closed forms that appear to balance precariously and/or “float” on a central base. These begin on the wheel and are then altered and combined, mirroring the natural environment and how it shapes forms through both intrinsic and external forces. Haskell’s tight glazing palette and innovative texturing techniques are essential to his process.

Since 2024, Haskell has expanded his practice to include cast bronze, cast glass, and hand-blown glass, working with artisans at Modern Art Foundry and Brooklyn Glass in New York City, and Berengo Studio in Murano, Italy.


Exhibitions:

Coming Soon, New York, 2015, 2016, 2017

Sight Unseen Offsite, New York, 2016

Raquel's Dream House, New York, 2018