Lisa Corinne Davis facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Lisa Corinne Davis
Lisa Corinne Davis
Born	Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Nationality	American
Education	Hunter College, Pratt Institute, Cornell University
Known for	Painting, drawing, writing, curating
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner, Louis Comfort Tiffany, National Endowment for the Arts

Lisa Corinne Davis, Psychotropic Turf, oil on canvas, 54.25" x 40", 2015.

Lisa Corinne Davis is an American visual artist known for abstract paintings and works on paper that suggest maps and other encoded forms of knowledge. She employs abstraction as a means of rendering the complexities of contemporary experience—including her own as an African-American woman—often questioning preconceived notions about identity, classification, and rationality versus subjectivity. Her densely layered, colorful work merges contrasting schemas, visual elements and formal languages, blurring distinctions between figuration and abstraction, real and fictive spaces and concepts, and microcosmic or macrocosmic reference. Brooklyn Rail critic Joan Waltemath wrote, "The urban experiences of space and time that Davis presents are subtle distillations of moment and coincidence ... Her attempt to map the shattered terrain of contemporary life points both to an awareness of other times and a belief in navigating the present one."

In 2022, Davis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also received awards from institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner and Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Victoria and Albert Museum (London), among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Hudson, New York and is a professor of art at Hunter College.

Early life and career

Davis was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She and her brother were raised by their mother after their father died when Davis was four. Her mother worked two jobs in order to send her children to a private, otherwise all-white Quaker school; she also earned a PhD and a JD, becoming one of the first African-American women in Maryland to do so. Davis attended Cornell University for two years before enrolling as a painting major at Pratt Institute in 1978 and earning a BFA in 1980. She went to graduate school at Hunter College, studying with Lynda Benglis, Ron Gorchov and Rosalind Krauss, among others, on the way to earning an MFA in 1983.

Davis began receiving recognition in the 1990s, for exhibitions at Art in General, Bronx Museum of The Arts, and Aljira, among others. She also began teaching at that time, serving at Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, Yale University, and beginning in 2002, Hunter College, where she co-directs the MFA Studio Art program.

Awards and public collections

Davis has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022) and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Bronx Museum of the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, among others. She was named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021 and an academician of the National Academy of Design in 2017. She has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, Dora Maar House (Brown Foundation/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Siena Arts Institute (Italy), and MacDowell.

Her work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, J. Paul Getty Museum, Montclair Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York Public Library, Rose Art Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Sheldon Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the U.S. Department of State, as well as to corporate, university and college collections.

Other professional activities

Davis has written essays on art and culture for Artforum, Artcritical and The Brooklyn Rail. Her topics have included blackness, feminist imagery, the artists Robert Reed and Niccolò di Pietro, the Dana Schutz painting Open Casket, and what she termed "Neo-Romanticism" in young artists' work. Her essay, "Towards a More Fluid Definition of Blackness" (2016), examined the art-world racial divide and constraints on the expression of black experience, including expectations that the work of black artists should embody overtly political representations of blackness.

Davis has curated exhibitions at Lesley Heller, the Hunter College Times Square Gallery (with Susan Crile), and Gerald Peters. The latter exhibition, "Representing Rainbows" (2016), was inspired by a 2014 article she wrote regarding the increasing appearance and meaning of rainbows—both a cliché symbol and a sublime phenomenon—in student work.