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.Wei, Lilly. "Lisa Corinne Davis at June Kelly," ''Art in America,'' February 2008.Yau, John
"Lisa Corinne Davis Critiques Corporate America Through Abstract Art,"
''Hyperallergic'', October 2020. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Lawrence, Alexi. "Lisa Corinne Davis," ''ARTnews'', May 2015. 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.Wayne, Leslie
"Fluid Interpretations: Lisa Corinne Davis Interviewed by Leslie Wayne,"
''Bomb'', September 30, 2021. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Waltemath, Joan
"Theory Mapping in the Interregnum: Lisa Davis, New Paintings,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', April 2015. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Epstein, Johanna Ruth. "Lisa Corinne Davis," ''ARTnews'', September 2007. 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.Wilkin, Karen
"At the Galleries,"
''The Hudson Review'', Winter 2021. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Wei, Lilly
"Lisa Corinne Davis: Interview,"
''Studio International'', August 2014. Retrieved April 12, 2022. ''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 Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Lisa Corinne Davis
Fellows. Retrieved April 13, 2022. She has also received awards from institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters,American Academy of Arts and Letters
"2021 Art Award Winners."
Retrieved April 13, 2022. Pollock-Krasner''Artforum''
"Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards $3.35 million in Grants to Artists and Nonprofits,"
News. June 22, 2021. Retrieved April 13, 2022. and Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations,Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
"Lisa Corinne Davis,"
Award Winners. Retrieved April 12, 2022. and

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

.National Endowment for the Arts. ''National Endowment for the Arts 1995 Annual Report''. Washington: National Endowment for the Arts, 1995, p. 76. Her work belongs to the public collections of the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), comprising the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, is the largest public arts institution in the city of San Francisco. The permanent collection of the ...

, and

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

(London), among others.Moynihan, Colin
"Eviction Battles Imperil a Queens Art Haven,"
''The New York Times'', June 7, 2014. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Philadelphia Museum of Art
''Willfully Whimsical'', 2006, Lisa Corinne Davis
Collection. Retrieved April 13, 2022.Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
Lisa Corinne Davis
Collection. Retrieved April 13, 2022.Victoria and Albert Museum
''Birthmark''
Item. Retrieved April 13, 2022. She lives and works in Brooklyn and

Hudson, New York Hudson is a city and the county seat of Columbia County, New York, United States. As of the 2020 census, it had a population of 5,894. Located on the east side of the Hudson River and 120 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, it was named for the rive ...

and is a professor of art at

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

.Hunter College
Lisa Corinne Davis
Art Faculty. Retrieved April 12, 2022.

Early life and career

Davis was born in

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

. 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.Samet, Jennifer
"Beer With A Painter: Lisa Corinne Davis,"
''Hyperallergic'', December 2020. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Hamer, Katy Diamond

''ARTnews'', November 26, 2014. Retrieved April 12, 2022. Davis attended

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

for two years before enrolling as a painting major at

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

in 1978 and earning a BFA in 1980. She went to graduate school at

, studying with

Lynda Benglis Lynda Benglis (born October 25, 1941) is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedaba ...

Ron Gorchov Ron Gorchov (April 5, 1930 – August 18, 2020) was an American artist. He was known for his colorful, abstract paintings on curved canvases. In the late 1960s, he began making oil-on-linen paintings on distinctive saddle-like stretchers, at once ...

and

Rosalind Krauss Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941) is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic ...

, among others, on the way to earning an MFA in 1983. Davis began receiving recognition in the 1990s, for exhibitions at

Art in General Art in General was a non-profit contemporary art exhibition space known for its vibrant and ground-breaking projects as a formidable and longstanding New York City alternative space, focused on giving meaningful resources and opportunities to ar ...

Bronx Museum of The Arts The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BxMA), also called the Bronx Museum of Art or simply the Bronx Museum, is an American cultural institution located in Concourse, Bronx, New York. The museum focuses on contemporary and 20th-century works created by A ...

, and Aljira, among others.Raynor, Vivien
"New Views on Contemporary Civilization and Its Discontents,"
''The New York Times'', June 20, 1993. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Cullum, Jerry. "'Layered' shows complex quest for identity, individuality," ''The Atlanta Journal-Constitution'', August 1994.Goodnough, Abby

''The New York Times'', June 9, 1996. Retrieved April 12, 2022. She also began teaching at that time, serving at

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, and beginning in 2002, Hunter College, where she co-directs the MFA Studio Art program.Hunter College
"Studio Art Co-Directors: Lisa Corinne Davis and Carrie Moyer,"
Announcements. Retrieved April 13, 2022.

Work and reception

Critic Karen Wilkin has written that Davis "courts ambiguity and multivalent associations" through an "inventive abstract language" informed by personal experience, social observation and the history of art.Wilkin, Karen. "Lisa Corinne Davis: Recent Work," ''The Hopkins Review'', Vol. 14, N4, 2021, p. 553–62. Her map-like compositions simultaneously evoke and undermine systems of coding and categorizing race, identity and knowledge, privileging complexity, contingency and the primacy of direct, individual understanding and perception over collective, often

essentialist Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In ''Categories'', Aristotle sim ...

frameworks. She does so by counterposing divergent structures and artistic forms in order to navigate between ideas of rationality and order and modes of expressivity, subjectivity and chaos. Her mark-making fuses two kinds of abstract language: line—as used objectively in geometry, mathematics and grids—and gesture, typically regarded in terms of affective expression (e.g., in

Abstract Expressionism Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

). In a similar way, she employs both objective, "natural" color and expressive, sometimes artificial color, moving between descriptive and psychological modes. Such juxtapositions also play out in the titles of her works, which frequently merge "factually" grounded words (territory, atlas, computation, position) with internal, subjective words (specious, psychopathic, metaphysical, impersonation).Majumdar, Sangram
"Noticing and being noticed: an interview with Lisa Corinne Davis,"
''Two Coats of Paint'', October 23, 2020. Retrieved April 12, 2022.

Early mixed-media work (1990–2003)

Davis's early mixed-media work used visual analogies to examine race, the quest for individual identity, and distinctions between self and other, individual and group.Sozanski, Edward J. "Galleries," ''The Philadelphia Inquirer'', November 1993. This work included ink self-portraits—which she covered with graphite, leaving only ghostly figural images below semi-reflective surfaces—and wall pieces and objects that combined raw construction with delicate painted imagery. ''Essential Traits No. 1'' (1996) was a representative early work, constructed out of pages from an old American history text, overwritten with new text that conveyed the constraints on identity posed by racially derived cultural assumptions. In solo shows at June Kelly (1998), Lehman College (2001) and Marlborough Gallery (2003), Davis produced obsessive, elaborately layered collage-style works that wedded modernist abstraction and postmodern content.Johnson, Ken

''The New York Times'', May 29, 1998, p. E38. Retrieved March 28, 2022.Cotter, Holland

''The New York Times'', May 4, 2001, p. E34. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Sirmans, Franklin and Susan Hoetzel
''Index''
Bronx, NY: Lehman College Art Gallery, 2001. Retrieved April 15, 2022. They were created out of hundreds of variable elements taken from magazines, novels and history books: multiracial headshots, cutouts of eyes, multicultural alphabet signs, maps and fingerprints, reproduced in a palette approximating a range of skin tones. She combined them into large, quilt- or chart-like compositions that abstracted systems of categorization while blurring reductive labels in favor of an individualistic view of social complexity.Tully, Judd
''High and Inside''
New York: Marlborough Chelsea, 2003. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Goodman, Jonathan. Review, ''Art in America'', June 2003.Cohen, David. "High & Inside at Marlborough," ''The New York Sun'', June 5, 2003. ''New York Times'' critic Ken Johnson wrote that this work "meditated with poetic indirection on race, culture, history and geography," while

Holland Cotter Holland Cotter is an art critic with ''The New York Times''. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Life and work Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, wh ...

described it as a blend of "pointed information and good-looking painting."

Painting (2005– )

In the 2000s, Davis staked out an increasingly abstract and fluid position in canvases that resembled maps or networks and explored systemic, documentary and narrative impulses. Situated more purely in painting, they dispensed with collage elements but retained that aesthetic through a dense layering of imagery and techniques. Davis approached subject matter in a more subtle, open-ended manner balanced with formal concerns, expanding earlier examinations of racial, gender and identity codes into evocations of wider knowledge systems, often revealed as contingent and futile in terms of their ability to capture the plurality of life.Joelson, Suzanne
"Gallery crawl in Hudson,"
''Two Coats of Paint'', September 2017. Retrieved April 12, 2022. The paintings in her show "Fact & Fiction" (June Kelly, 2007) combined skeins of curling lines, flat cartoonish shapes, and passages of spilled or squeezed paint, layered over backgrounds of blue, white, and green squares. The lines suggested skewed latitude and longitude grids or organic webs, while the flat shapes resembled landmasses or plant, insect and anatomical forms, accumulating details suggesting the technical and the handmade (e.g., ''Mutant Schema'', 2006; ''Doodle Verité'', 2007). Davis painted them with an eye-catching, sometimes artificial palette that departed from the more somber earth and flesh tones of her past work; at times, the color emitted an unsettling or poisonous aura, evoking burst corpuscles, cellular malignancies, fire or lethal sludge, as with the feverish, red-orange smears and shapes in works such as ''Verifiably Metaphysical'' and ''Regulatory Plasma'' (both 2007). ''Art in America'' 's Lilly Wei wrote, Davis's "riddled maps seem both familiar and not, suggesting aerial views of enigmatic terrain, details of a landscape in toxic erosion … an updated ''War of the Worlds'' chemaor a blueprint of our ecological madness." In exhibitions between 2010 and 2017—at Lesley Heller, Spanierman Modern, Galerie Gris and Gerald Peters (New York), Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago), and

Mayor Gallery The Mayor Gallery is an art gallery located in Cork Street, London, England. Since its foundation by Fred Mayor in partnership with Douglas Cooper in 1925, it has promoted modern and contemporary art. Since the early 1970s, under the new impul ...

(London)—Davis extended the complexity of her themes and abstract syntaxes.Princenthal, Nanc
"Contemporary Art Steams Up the Hudson,"
''The New York Times'', August 24, 2017. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Wawzenek, Tom
"Zolla/Lieberman Gallery Presents Two Compelling Solo Exhibitions,"
''Third Coast Review'', September 2017. Retrieved April 13, 2022.Brooks, Katherine
"'The Nature Of Women' Exhibition Honors The Female Artists Who Prove Abstraction Isn't A Man's Game,"
''HuffPost'', July 24, 2013. Retrieved April 13, 2022. Her proliferating forms—seemingly drawn from microscopic and macroscopic realms (cells, roads, maps, city grids, geographic fault lines), as well as the mechanical world of circuits and motherboards—charted concepts encompassing the urban experience of space and time, the fragmentation of contemporary life, and the diverse, intersecting strands of identity. Critics described them as "haphazardly rendered topographies or warped atlas pages" delicately balanced between organic chaos and linear order, whose titles (e.g., ''Psychopathic Territory'' and ''Psychotropic Turf'', both 2015) undermined their reliability as maps. Joan Waltemath suggested these ideas were offset by humor and irreverence, expressed through Davis's use of outline as a kind of doodling gesture in works such as ''Flim Flam Plan'' (2015). Reviews identified a deliberate, increasingly unstable quality of collapse or collision in the paintings in Davis's show "All Shook Up" (Pamela Salisbury, 2020). Its fifteen vertically oriented, vibrant works combined warped and decomposing grids, puzzle-like shapes, abutting planes and linear bands, placed in off-balance, syncopated rhythms and depthless space. Critics such as

John Yau John Yau (born June 5, 1950) is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction ...

and Karen Wilkin suggested that their visual schemas and intentionally elusive titles (''Registered Impersonation'', 2020; ''Captious Computation'', 2019) summoned a range of contradictory associations—natural to man-made, ephemeral and organic to technological—as well as allusions to corporate and governmental intrusion into private life. Yau wrote, "the artist’s ability to call forth the invisible world, in which we are constantly leaving traces of our presence, injects an unexpected and much-needed jolt into abstraction"; Wilkin suggested the paintings evoked "the long views inherent in mapping and the intimacy of textiles."

Awards and public collections

Davis has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022) and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Lisa Corinne Davis
Artists. Retrieved March 31, 2022.

New York Foundation for the Arts The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is an independent 501(c)(3) charity, funded through government, foundation, corporate, and individual support, established in 1971. It is part of a network of national not-for-profit arts organizations ...

,Armstrong, Annie
"New York Foundation for the Arts Awards 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowships,"
''ARTnews'', July 10, 2018. Retrieved April 12, 2022. Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Bronx Museum of the Arts,Bronx Museum of the Arts
Aim Fellowship
Retrieved April 13, 2022. 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 The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...

in 2017.National Academy of Design
Lisa Corinne Davis
People. Retrieved April 12, 2022. She has been awarded artist residencies at

Yaddo Yaddo is an artists' community located on a estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March ...

Dora Maar Henriette Theodora Markovitch (22 November 1907 – 16 July 1997), known as Dora Maar, was a French photographer, painter, and poet. A romantic partner of Pablo Picasso, Maar was depicted in a number of Picasso's paintings, including his ''Portr ...

House (Brown Foundation/

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...

), Siena Arts Institute (Italy), and MacDowell.Yaddo
Visual Artists
Retrieved April 13, 2022.Siena Art Institute
"Lisa Corinne Davis in Siena,"
News. Retrieved April 13, 2022.MacDowell
Lisa Corinne Davis
Artists. Retrieved April 13, 2022. 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 The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since openin ...

New York Public Library The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress ...

,New York Public Library
''Red Coat''
Retrieved April 13, 2022. Rose Art Museum,

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue) b ...

, Sheldon Museum of Art,Sheldon Museum of Art
Lisa Corinne Davis
Collection. Retrieved April 13, 2022. Victoria and Albert Museum, and the U.S. Department of State,U.S. Department of State
Lisa Corinne Davis
Personnel, Art in Embassies. Retrieved April 13, 2022. 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,Davis, Lisa Corinne
"Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness,"
''Artcritical'', October 26, 2016. Retrieved April 12, 2022. feminist imagery,Davis, Lisa Corinne
"Goddesses, Ovaries, and the Seductress: Bring It On Home To Me,"
September 2011. Retrieved April 13, 2022. the artists

Robert Reed Robert Reed (born John Robert Rietz Jr.; October 19, 1932 – May 12, 1992) was an American actor. He played Kenneth Preston on the legal drama '' The Defenders'' from 1961 to 1965 alongside E. G. Marshall, and is best known for his role as the ...

and

Niccolò di Pietro Niccolò di Pietro, also Niccolo di Pietro Veneziano, Niccolo Paradiso, (active late 14th century-early 15th century) was a Sienese School painter of Medieval art. The date of his birth and death are unknown. Family life In the archival docum ...

,Davis, Lisa Corinne
"Robert Reed (1938–2014),"
''Artforum'', February 18, 2015. Retrieved April 12, 2022.Davis, Lisa Corinne. "Lisa Corinne Davis on Niccolo di Pietro," ''Painters on Painting'', May 2014. the Dana Schutz painting ''

Open Casket ''Open Casket'' is a 2016 painting by Dana Schutz. The subject is Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. It was one of the works included at the 2017 ''Whitney Biennial'' exhibition in New Y ...

'',Davis, Lisa Corinne
"Open Casket: 'Enquête' regarding the Dana Schutz affair, the painting, the protests,"
''Artcritical'', March 27, 2017. Retrieved April 12, 2022. and what she termed "Neo-Romanticism" in young artists' work.Davis, Lisa Corinne
"Batman, Bernini and Young Romantics,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', December 2009. Retrieved April 13, 2022. 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.Davis, Lisa Corinne
"Representing Rainbows,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', March 2014. Retrieved April 13, 2022.

References

External links

Lisa Corinne Davis website Lisa Corinne Davis
''Sound & Vision'', Episode 207

''Gorky's Granddaughter'', 2021
Lisa Corinne Davis
''Cerebral Women'', Episode 35
Lisa Corinne Davis interview
''WYCX Radio'', Yale University, 2018 *Lisa Corrine Davis
"Towards a more fluid definition of Blackness,"
''artcritical'', 2016
Lisa Corinne Davis
artist page, Jenkins Johnson Gallery {{DEFAULTSORT:Davis, Lisa Corinne American contemporary painters 20th-century American painters 21st-century American painters African-American contemporary artists 20th-century African-American painters 20th-century African-American women 21st-century African-American women American women painters 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American women artists 21st-century African-American artists African-American women artists American art educators Hunter College faculty Hunter College alumni Pratt Institute alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people)