David Wasserman was born in New York City in 1917. A graduate of Cooper Union, he operated a successful graphic design studio in Manhattan for over forty years. In the late 1960's he began using his evenings and weekends to produce art in the basement of his Long Island home, entirely for his own pleasure and without any commercial motive. Over the next thirty years, he fastened pieces of tin cans, aluminum soda cans, roll copper and sign painter’s metal to plywood, using these materials to assemble almost forty works depicting a great variety of subjects and styles, including abstractions, portraits, landscapes, still-life, and even cartoons. None of these works was publicly displayed or sold during the artist’s lifetime, and they were only seen by family, friends and neighbors.

David Wasserman and his wife moved to Nashville in 1998 to be closer to their son Steven and his family. After the artist’s death in 1999, Steven began introducing his father’s art to the public. David Wasserman’s works have since been shown at the Tennessee State Museum, the Gordon Jewish Community Center, Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, the Appalachian Center for Craft, The University of the South, the Lane Motor Museum, and Nashville International Airport.

The artist and his work have also been the subject of newspaper articles in New York’s Newsday, the Nashville Tennessean and the Chattanooga Times, and of television features on Tennessee Crossroads and Talk of the Town.  Photographs of several of his major pieces can be found in Bobby Hansson’s “The Fine Art of the Tin Can” (Lark Books, 2004), a survey of art created from recycled material.