Don Christensen

Don Christensen is an American artist and musician. He studied art at the University of Nebraska before attending the Kansas City Art Institute on a full scholarship from 1968 to 1970. From 1976 to 1988, he worked professionally as a musician in New York. Between 1986 and 2004, he served as the conservator and curator of the lifework of self-taught artist Emery Blagdon, organizing and mounting fifteen exhibitions in the United States and Europe. In 1990, Christensen began painting, establishing a parallel visual art practice.

Christensen’s work spans painting, music, and collaborative production. His background as a drummer informs a sustained interest in rhythm, repetition, and pattern across media. In the late 1970s, he recorded an improvised session with composer and electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel, performing on drums alongside Spiegel’s ElectroComp 101 synthesizer. The recording, titled Donnie and Laurie, documents an early exchange between downtown improvisation and electronic composition and was released by Unseen Worlds in 2017. In his visual practice, Christensen has explored connections between geometry, symmetry, and musical structure, including research into patterned textiles undertaken while composing the score for the animated film Africa in 1999.

Christensen has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for painting in 1992, a New York Foundation for the Arts painting fellowship in 1996, and was selected for the Aljira Emerge 6 program in 2005. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990s, including shows at Douglas Drake Gallery, Bruno Marina Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, and ILLE Arts, as well as group exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center.