b. 1990
Douglas Breault (pronounced ‘bro’) is an interdisciplinary artist who overlaps elements of photography, painting, sculpture, and video. His work has been collected, published, and exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Space Place Gallery (Russia), the Bristol Art Museum, the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Amos Eno Gallery, and VSOP Projects. Breault has been an artist in residence at MassMoca and AS220, and was awarded the Montague Travel Grant to study in London and Paris in 2017. Douglas is a professor of art at Babson College and Bridgewater State University, and he has been a guest critic at MassArt, Wellesley College, Kansas City Art Institute, and the Slade College of Art, among others. He has been a contributing writer for publications including the Boston Art Review, Lenscratch, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Bridgewater Review, and he is the Exhibitions Director at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA where he organizes and curates exhibitions. He received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA in Studio Art from Bridgewater State University, and he currently divides his time between Boston, MA and Providence, RI.
“I freely misapply traditional artistic methods of photography, painting, and sculpture by purposely misaligning materials and connecting disparate fragments to navigate ideas of personal memory, fatherhood, and the intangible aspects of life and death. Materiality is essential to develop my ideas, subordinating form to process, to navigate an understanding of uncertain aspects of truth and change. This process enlists archival images, inherited objects, and merging materials and photographs to coalesce to reveal a new image. I lost my father to suicide when I was eighteen years old, initiating my interest in artmaking as a means of translating absence into objects and images, utilizing imagination to intervene where memory fails to accurately recall. My curiosity questions the limitations of a photograph to accurately depict a life, contemplating how an image can be unfolded or obscured to describe a person or place that is paradoxically missing.”
Q. If you could offer your younger self any advice at the start of your artistic career, what would it be?”
A. “Don’t be afraid to be the weird one in the room.”