The Department of Art Education is thrilled to announce that David LeRue (MFA, PhD candidate) has been appointed in a tenure-track postion as of August 1, 2024. David’s biography follows below.
David LeRue (BFA, MFA) is an artist, teacher, and researcher working between research-creation, qualitative research, and community-engaged pedagogical practices. His work theorizes the contradictions of community through developing and using inductive methods of participatory arts-based research informed by oral history to understand how places are experienced and interpreted on the grassroots level. Through using dialectical philosophies, he has come to understand community and places as inherently contradictory, subject to ongoing social and physical re-imaginings.
David has taught studio, writing, and pre-service teachers at Concordia in various capacities since 2017, and studio arts to kids, teens, and adults in community settings in Montreal and Nova Scotia since 2015. His teaching style adopts principles of critical pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to foster inclusive learning environments that prioritize inductive discovery and self-advocacy. As an artist, he has shown at numerous galleries and artist-run centres across Canada. His work focuses on 2D landscape painting practices, applying the principles and approaches to landscape painting to the built environment of the city, with his most recent solo exhibition Et pourtant, ça bouge examining architectures that no longer serve their initial functions that are nevertheless preserved for their deeper symbolic meanings. Presently, he makes paintings of dogs and plein-air landscape paintings in the city. He is being represented by Atelier-galerie LaChapelle in Bromont, Québec.
David has published nationally and internationally in books such as Arts Education: A Global Affair (2023) and Disruption and Convergence (Forthcoming 2024), and in journals such as The International Journal of Education through the Arts (IJETA), Canadian Art Teacher (CAT), and with the Architecture Media Politics Society (AMPS) research network. His dissertation project called Landscape as Method and Model (Forthcoming August 2024) examines the changing landscape of Montreal’s Sud-Ouest through a personal painting-as-research-creation project and a community-based research-creation project which invited participants to make their own works of arts-based research. His recent major publications include: ‘Meaning and Making: Laying the Groundwork for Community-Based Research-Creation’ in the journal LEARNing Landscapes (2023), which articulates a method for conjoining oral history approaches, ethics, and frameworks to community artmaking; A three-contribution arc with Pakistan-based artist and professor Rabeya Jalil on the role of painting and pedagogy as research titled ‘What Does it Mean to Paint in the 2020s: A Practice-Led Model for Painters,’ ‘How to Paint a Dog: Reflections and Reservations on a Visual Commonality,' and 'Painters and Their Places: Toward a Dialectical Understanding of Personal and Community Painting Practices’ in Disruption and Convergence (Forthcoming from Brill Publishing in June 2024); And ‘Analyzing ‘Easel Painting’ in the Expanded Field of Research-Creation’ forthcoming in Arts-Research International that examines the role and place of painting and other fine-arts mediums in emerging discourses of arts-based research.
David has current and planned collaborations and partnerships with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on the City of Montreal (CIRM) at McGill, Ross Creek Centre for the Arts in Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) Drawing Lab, and the Pointe-Saint-Charles Art School. He co-founded the Shortcuts for Teachers Artists Collective (STAC) to study the efficacy of fine-arts teaching methods and approaches across academic contexts, which brings together elementary, secondary, post-secondary, community, and museum educators. He is a member of the Center for Oral History at Concordia, the Canadian Society for Education through the Arts (CSEA), and the National Art Education Association (NAEA). He presently serves on the board of directors of Bâtiment 7, a 90,000-square-foot grassroots development project in Pointe-Saint-Charles, and on the board of the Pointe-Saint-Charles Art School.