Nancy Davidson

Nancy Davidson is an American artist best known for large-scale inflatable sculptures regarded as hyper-feminized abstractions of the human female form. Bulbous and flesh-like, the sculptures resemble buttocks and breasts and employ erotic cultural signifiers in their shape and decoration. Davidson's work spans art media but centers around sculpture. It is largely post-minimal in character and described by commentators as providing a feminist counterpoint to the male-dominated, minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, as well as to cultural tropes involving bodies that the works themselves invoke. Of particular note are Davidson's use of humor and a sense of absurdity to seemingly both celebrate and subvert these tropes, inviting their investigation but without the seriousness and moralism that often accompany critical works. Sculpture Magazine critic Robert Raczka wrote that "The confectionary color and oversize scale" of Davidson's sculpture creates a "playfully upbeat mood that allows feminist and gender issues to rise to the surface at irregular intervals, without didacticism." Pollock-Krasner and Creative Capital grants, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, among others. She lives and works in New York City.

Life and career Born and raised in Chicago, Davidson was involved in art from an early age, observing her father paint landscapes and later, attending classes at Chicago's Junior Art Institute. After relocating to New York, she began using textiles in her work and showed steadily throughout the 1980s—in group shows at the MCA and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and in solo exhibitions, mainly at Chicago's Marianne Deson Gallery. Following this shift, her works were selected for group exhibits at the Whitney Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, and appeared in solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1999) and Contemporary Arts Center (2001) in Cincinnati, among other venues; she also appeared in the well-known feminist exhibition, "Bad Girls West" (1994). Davidson branched out into other media during this period, including video and photography.

Concurrent with her professional art career, Davidson taught at a number of institutions, including University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Williams College, and State University of New York at Purchase College, where she completed a 24-year tenure. frottage drawing, and with textiles. In the early 1990s, she began experimenting with latex weather balloons, and by 1993 had begun showing the feminized, anthropomorphic sculptures for which she became known. While Davidson's sculptures echo these works in scale and level of abstraction, their soft pliability, light weight and ebullient femininity stand in sharp contrast with the rigid and heavy, sober works cast in steel and concrete by the artist's predecessors. which, in 1967, occupied the same atrium space at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for which Davidson's piece was commissioned. Fashioned from latex weather balloons, Blue Moon (1998) was included in the group show, "Sculpture-Figure-Woman" (Landesgalerie, 1998) which originated in Linz, Austria and travelled to Chemnitz, Germany; the piece was subsequently featured in Der Spiegel magazine.

Davidson's stable of undergarment-clad works also include the egg-like Netella (1998), as well as Buttress (1998) and Dulcinea (1999)—two pillar-like stack sculptures over fifteen feet high. As with Lulu, Davidson revisited Buttress, reprising it with the similar but distinct, bright green Stacked in 2016. Hang 'Em High (1999), was nearly twenty feet square and featured side-by-side red spheres veiled by netting and hung by a rope, which also bound the piece vertically at the center.

Between 2016 and 2018, Davidson did multiple solo exhibitions—including "Ridin' High" (2016) and "Per Sway" (2017–8), both of which featured new veins of work. One prominent theme involved the relationship of privilege to vantage point and had eyeballs and knots of various character mounted atop platforms of various heights. She also produced a 7-minute video of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby titled I Am Not Tame (2016), meant to be played on loop in a video installation.

Public recognition Davidson has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), Creative Capital (2005),

Commentators have also noted that Davidson's 1990s work intersects with—and appears to have foreshadowed—cultural shifts in body image and desirability that became prevalent in the 2010s. At MTV's 2019 Video Music Awards, a performance by singer Lizzo featured a set prop—a large inflatable buttocks sculpture—that resembled Davidson's work. Others have drawn comparisons between Davidson's sculptures and the buxom body image popularized by media stars such as Kim Kardashian.