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Despite the realities of social and geographic mobility, society seeks to maintain definitive categories of racial, national and ethnic groups. This categorization is the defining function by which we attempt to make a simplified order of the world.
My work explores this complex relationship of race, culture, and history, where form and content merge. Addressing both the autobiographical and global, while drawing on the past, present, and future, I manipulate form, transforming the familiar, subverting its original meaning and connotation through reinterpreting and reconfiguring.
I look for ways to codify the structure of information by using abstraction in both the imagery and the ideas. Maps are used as a point of departure, working with the logic of the poet rather than that of the demographer in setting up categories, collecting data, and creating pseudo graphs and charts. I play with place as a geographical, metaphorical, and metaphysical concept, where intersecting worlds collide and give birth to intimations of mapped space, geopolitical realities of national borders; indications of population density and critical mass, and parts resembling errant engineering models or animated characters. I hope that these oblique narratives, shifting spaces and wandering images may open a way forward in allowing pictorial construction to become variables of thought and feeling. The medium of paint has the last word.
Lisa Corinne Davis received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Hunter College. Her paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, including one person shows at June Kelly Gallery (New York), Gerald Peters Gallery (New York), Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (Chicago), Pamela Salisbury Gallery, (Hudson, NY), and The Mayor Gallery (London), and have been reviewed in The Telegraph, Art News, Art in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times. Davis is currently represented by Miles McEnery Gallery (New York) and The Mayor Gallery (London).
Davis’ work is included in many private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art (documented in Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by Gwendolyn DuBois, Yale University Press, 2014).
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, four Artist Fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2017, she was inducted as a National Academician at the National Academy Museum & School.
Davis has taught at the Yale University School of Art and is currently a Professor of Art at Hunter College. She has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth College, and the National Arts Education Association. Her essays on art and culture have been published in Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical, and Art Forum.