David Kassan is an American painter known for his life-size portraits and long-term documentary projects. His work has been exhibited in major institutions including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and solo exhibitions at the USC Fisher Museum of Art and the Holocaust Museum Houston. His ongoing project Facing Survival focuses on painting Holocaust survivors, preserving their stories through direct observation. After more than two decades in Brooklyn, Kassan relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The landscape and communities of the Southwest have since become central to his work, leading him to paint the last remaining Navajo Code Talkers and expand into a broader Western body of work rooted in a contemporary sense of regionalism. Grounded in lived experience, his paintings bridge portraiture and place—shaped by his slow-burning meditations of the Southwest, where light lingers, time stretches, and the land holds its own quiet memory, carried through each figure, each edge, each mark.

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