Danny Floyd is an artist, researcher, curator, and educator based out of Chicago. He holds a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), an MA in Visual & Critical Studies, and an MFA in Sculpture both from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). At the risk of confusion, his work seeks the narrow threshold between meaning and nonsense in text and images. Often at odds with neuro-normative conventions, he embraces divergent thinking through improvisation and the delightfully weird. He is motivated by the spatial quality of language: the page as a site of potential, the room as an analogy for the page, architecture as a type of syntax, or language as a type of atmosphere. His conceptual process foregrounds reading and listening practices as cultural production rather than passive reception. With a particular focus on installation sculpture, his curatorial practice practice centers around devising exhibition themes driven by writing, research, and collaborative conversation with exhibiting artists.
Danny is an Assistant Professor, Adjunct of Visual & Critical Studies, Sculpture, and the Undergraduate Division at SAIC. He also served as the Exhibitions Director for ACRE. Since 2013, he has been an active part of Chicago's artist-run space community through two programs, Ballroom Projects and Adler & Floyd. He has held curatorial residencies with ACRE and Chicago Artists Coalition. He was also awarded the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Curatorial Fellowship in 2017. He has attended studio residencies at ACRE; AS220 in Providence, RI; Earthbound Moon in Eugene, OR; The Residency Project in Pasadena, CA; and The Roger Brown House in New Buffalo, MI. He began his teaching career in 2010 at a self-proclaimed “postmodern art camp” in Western Massachusetts for children aged 11 to 16 whose freewheeling ethos of interdisciplinary experimentation still informs his teaching and art-making.