David Askevold

David Askevold (30 March 1940 – 23 January 2008) was an experimental Canadian artist who lived in Nova Scotia.

Askevold studied art and anthropology at the University of Montana. In 1963, he won a Max Beckmann Scholarship to study painting for a year at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York. In 1966, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, in Sculpture. Askevold went to Halifax and joined the faculty of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1968.

As a teacher at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the 1970s, David Askevold developed and led what he called the Projects Class. In what was identified as “the most innovative and interesting aspect of the NSCAD curriculum of the period,” (Gil McElroy, ARTSatlantic, Spring/Summer 1996). Askevold selected artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson, Lucy Lippard, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner and invited them to submit projects that he and his students would then carry out. In the Fall of 1969, Robert Barry proposed that the students get together and "decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex..." Sol LeWitt presented a "to do" list for the class which included: "1. A work that uses the idea of error 2. A work that uses the idea of incompleteness 3. A work that uses the idea of infinity...." Robert Smithson suggested a work that would involve mud being dumped over a cliff. Lawrence Weiner asked students to "remove" some unspecified thing "Halfway Between the Equator and the North Pole."

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