Installation view, Dave Eassa: Head Above the Clouds, October 2025. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann.
Dave Eassa: Head Above the Clouds
October 4, 2025 - March 1, 2026
At once elegy and offering, Head Above the Clouds explores the artist Dave Eassa’s experiences of love, loss, and longing. Through painting, sculpture, and collaborative installations, Eassa explores his relationship to familial histories and archives, as well as the complexity of grief and joy he uncovers in this process.
Anchored by a new series of figurative paintings, his first created in San Diego since relocating from Baltimore, Eassa constructs a dreamscape shaped by memory. Drawn from his family and personal archives, as well as his daily life, these paintings serve as monuments to the everyday and the people who shape us.
At the heart of the exhibition is a cloud-like sculptural seating installation, a gathering place for rest, reflection, and conversation. Suspended above are four sails, each representing a season of life, featuring the drawings and paintings of youth and community partners created through a series of workshops at the California Center for the Arts and The New Children's Museum.
Building on Eassa’s history of community-centered practice over the last decade, Head Above the Clouds underscores the essential role of collaboration in contemporary artmaking. In inviting others to dream and reflect alongside him, the artist subverts traditional notions of authorship and affirms the power of shared storytelling.
Dave Eassa (b. 1991, Ellicott City, MD) is a visual artist, curator, and cultural organizer based in San Diego, CA. Working across painting, sculpture, and socially engaged practice, his work explores personal and collective memory, love, and the possibilities of community. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Cody Gallery (VA), The Shed Space (MD), and Sistered (ME), and group exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery (NY), LVL3 (Chicago), and Signal (NY). Eassa’s work has been featured in New American Paintings, The Washington Post, and BmoreArt, and is held in collections including the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. A 2015 Open Society Institute Fellow, Eassa founded Free Space, a pioneering arts program in Maryland’s prison system. He has held senior roles at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he led initiatives such as the BMA Lexington Market satellite and co-curated Histories Collide: Jackie Milad x Fred Wilson x Nekisha Durrett. A Salzburg Global Fellow and recipient of numerous public art and artist awards, Eassa continues to build projects that merge aesthetics with equity, and community with care.
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This exhibition is organized by the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, with special thanks to The New Children's Museum, Persian Place, Escondido Union School District, and staff at the California Center the Arts, Escondido for hosting and sharing space with several workshops which contributed to the collaborative spirit of Four Sails.
