Biography

Lisa Corinne Davis is a Brooklyn-based painter best known for paintings and works on paper that resemble multilayered maps with encoded narratives. Her “inventive geography” prompts a wide range of interpretations; its open-endedness is a stance she actively cultivates. The resultant mix of eclectic form and content is surprising as well as stimulating. Davis, who is African American, says her practice explores the complex relationship between “race, culture and history” and, with it, ideas about classification and contingency, the rational and irrational, chaos and order.

Born in Baltimore, MD, 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 and have been received positively by the press including The Telegraph, Art News, Art in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hopkins Review, The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail.  Davis is currently represented by Miles McEnery Gallery (New York), Jenkins Johnson Gallery (Los Angeles, San Francisco & New York) and The Mayor Gallery (London).

Davis’ work is included in many prestigious 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, which is documented in the book, 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 numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and three Artist Fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she was inducted as a National Academician at the National Academy Museum & School. 

A renowned professor, having taught at the Yale University School of Art, and currently as Professor of Art, and Co-Director of the MFA, at Hunter College.  She has lectured widely on her work and other art related subjects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth College, Cornell University, the National Academy of Design, and the National Arts Education Association to name a few. Her essays on art and culture have been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical and Art Forum magazines.

Davis is a fully engaged participant in the current art scene with recorded podcasts, participation in performance art, curatorial projects, and inclusion in the films Flow State and The Art of Making It.