Lisa Corinne Davis

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." 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. 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 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.

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. 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 frameworks. 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. 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. 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. New York Foundation for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, 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, Rose Art Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Sheldon Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, 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.