Jim Dahl has been involved with art and art teaching since 1980.
A graduate of UC Davis with a degree in History and a BFA in Painting from Art Center College. He lived and worked in Brooklyn from 1986-2003. He completed his MFA in Painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers 1992, and earned an Masters in Art Education from Teachers College Columbia University, 2006.
Jim’s artwork represents visual experiences in a world of constant, complex change and variation. Ultimately the works envision transformation, glimmer of consciousness within a parade of form.
In the 1990’s while teaching as an itinerant artist in NYC public schools, he organized community art festivals for the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition in Red Hook. At the invitation of Community School District 14, he directed an artist residency program for K-8 classrooms in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Grant support enabled three years of curated exhibitions at the Independence Community Bank branch in Red Hook. The venue’s design as an art gallery enabled a forum for conceptually driven displays of the vibrant South Brooklyn community.
He also served as a grant advisor for the Community Assets Organizational Support Program of the New Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) from 1997-2000.
He also taught studio art for the Brooklyn Museum, and served as an adjunct professor at Kean University, The College of New Jersey and Long Island University.
From 2003 to 2013, he taught art education for CSU Fullerton contributing to development of art education teachers throughout the Southland, in addition to active membership in the California Art Education Association. The interest in educational process continues through work leading Visual Artmaking Programs for inmates in California State Prisons as an artist with the Muckenthaler Cultural Foundation.
The effort to organize this site recognizes that the work remains eclectic. Content engages points of view through word play, relating or uncovering alternate significance, or activating meaningful symbols in narrative. This work involves both juxtaposition and recognition of darker implications in a search for truth that looks beyond overdetermined channels for reading meaning. Many of these works appear ordinary, while they are also evoke new layers of meaning as artworks are experienced through time, as new meanings emerge, and as the works inhabit new spaces. Sometimes these represent lived experiences, both real and imagined.