David Bierk

Born in Appleton, Wisconsin to Glennon Bierk, and Doris Ruth Steenson;[2] following his parents divorce Bierk moved with his mother to Lafayette, California.[3]

Bierk said of his childhood, "We were plunked into an upper middle class neighbourhood before divorce was common, and she [my mother] not only provided for me but also was my mother, father, teacher and friend. It was my uncle Spiros, though, who taught me - at an early age - what you might call the work ethic. I always worked, at least from the time I was in grade six or seven. Spiros owned a mayonnaise factory in San Francisco and I started working there, doing things like scraping the labels of returned mayonnaise bottles and scraping the mold from cheese - eight hour days in the summers from the time I was 12 or 13."[3]

Bierk graduated from high school in 1962 and joined the National Guard.[3][1] Initially he studied at California College of Arts & Crafts,[4][5] Bierk dropped out after a year and half, and as he described it, "...I took off, hitchhiked across the country, ended up in Florida, and then caught a boat to the Bahamas....I got a job as librarian at...Mary Star of the Sea School, a Catholic grammar school, where I persuaded Sister Mary Alice to let me teach art as well."[3]

Upon his return to California, Bierk was admitted to Humboldt State University where he earned a bachelor of arts 1969, and a master of fine arts in 1970.[6][7][1]

Bierk's sister-in-law lived in Toronto, Canada, and in 1971 he immigrated there with his young family.[8]

During the year that he lived in Toronto, Bierk immersed himself in the local cultural scene, which he described, "...I familiarized myself with the gallery scene...which struck me as vibrant, pioneering, and exploratory."[3] Bierk migrated to Peterborough, Ontario in 1972 to take up a teaching position at Kenner Collegiate Vocational Institute, and later at Fleming College.[3]

Along with poet, Dennis Tourbin, Bierk founded and directed Artspace between 1974 and 1987, which was one of Canada's earliest artist operated art centers.[9][10][1]

In a June 2001 Art in America review, critic Jonathan Goodman wrote, "Bierk quotes from the past not so much to critique current art as to reinterpret a way of seeing that he associates with artists as disparate as Vermeer, Eakins, Ingres, Manet and Fantin-Latour....[Bierk] accomplishes this particularly well when he starkly juxtaposes two or three of his eclectic art-historical references within a single work." Noting the work's "virtuoso" technical quality, Goodman also observes that Bierk's "marvelously romantic" landscape paintings are, unlike these referential paintings, invented images, rather than appropriated or copied from masterworks.[11] Both Goodman's review and Bierk's 2002 New York Times obituary note that Bierk used framing to call attention, in a way that is pointedly "postmodern", to the historical disjunction between the evoked masterworks and the contemporary cultural environment: "He painted copies of works by artists like Vermeer or the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, for example, and framed them within broad steel panels, setting up a tension between humanism and old masterly craft on the one hand, and Modernist abstraction and industrial fabrication on the other."[1]

• Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia[12]
• Art Gallery of Peterborough, Peterborough, Ontario
• The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario[13]
• Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario
• Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida
• Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, Ontario
• The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio
• Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Evansville, Indiana
• Museum London, London, Ontario
• Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario[14]
• City of Peterborough, Ontario
• Tom Thomson Art Gallery Owen Sound, Ontario

• 1991 Best Album Cover of the Year, RAW Magazine
• 1980-81 Ontario Association of Art Galleries Poster Design, First Prize
• 1980 Ontario Association of Art Galleries Catalogue Design, First Prize
• 1979-80 Ontario Association of Art Galleries, Best Overall Gallery Image, First Prize
• 1979 Ontario Association of Art Galleries, Newsletter Design, First Prize
• Canada Council Artist-in-Residence, North Bay, Ontario
• Royal Canadian Academy of Arts[15]

Bierk became Canadian citizen in 1978.[16] Bierk married Kathleen Mae Hunter in Freeport, Bahamas in 1967.[17] Following his divorce from Hunter, Bierk married Elizabeth Lovett Aimers at Abercorn, Quebec in 1980.[18][1] Bierk had eight children, Sebastian Bach, the former lead singer for the rock group Skid Row; Zac Bierk, a Canadian ice hockey player; Heather Dylan, a Canadian actress; Lisa Hare; Alexander Bierk; Jeffrey Bierk; Nicholas Bierk; and Charles Bierk.[1]

Bierk died in Peterborough, Ontario in August 2002, aged 57, from pneumonia related to ongoing leukemia.[1]