Airport by David Levinthal

Airport by David Levinthal 

David Levinthal was born in 1949 in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay Area. Although the artist now lives in Manhattan, he visits San Francisco on a frequent basis. Fond childhood memories of air travel with his parents in the 1950s inspired this collection of images, presented here on the twentieth anniversary of its original exhibition by SFO Museum in 1996.

Using vintage toys from the collection of the San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Library and Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum, Levinthal fabricated scenes that provoke memories of air travel. Levinthal recalls a time when San Francisco International Airport consisted of one terminal building and propliners dominated the runways—a period when air travel was a unique and special event. Women wore gloves, men wore hats, and everyone dressed their best for the nine-hour flight from San Francisco to New York City.

David Levinthal received a BA in Studio Art from Stanford University and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Mr. Levinthal’s works are included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; The Brooklyn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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