In collaboration with the Williamsburg Biannual, Lisa Corinne Davis presents “What’s Going On?,” a solo exhibition surveying paintings and works on paper from 2017 - 2026. A press preview will be held on Saturday, September 26th from 5:00 - 6:00 PM, with an artist-led tour of the exhibition. The show will then open to the public with an artist’s reception from 6:00 - 8:00 PM and remain on view through 30 January 2027.

Lisa Corinne Davis creates works centered on multilayered, narrative-encoded networks. Cultivating an open-ended approach, she crafts an “inventive geography” that invites diverse interpretations. Her art produces a thought-provoking and unexpected fusion of eclectic form and subject matter. As an African American artist, Davis uses her practice to examine the intricate dynamics among race, history, and culture. Through this lens, her work addresses themes of order and chaos, rationality and irrationality, as well as contingency and classification.

The Williamsburg Biannual opened on September 7, 2024, and has since presented exhibitions featuring artists working across disciplines within an extraordinary architectural space. A non-profit dedicated to supporting New York City artists, the institution promotes artistic experimentation, interdisciplinary dialogue, and engagement with Brooklyn’s vibrant creative community. Designed by architect Jorge A. Zapata, the building is an adaptive reuse and expansion of a historic 1920s warehouse, incorporating public gathering areas, a black-box event space, an informal auditorium, and casual seating across three floors.

FOREWORD

The Board of Directors of the Williamsburg Biannual are thrilled to launch our third year of operation with esteemed artist and renowned educator Lisa Corinne Davis. We are honored to present "What’s Going On?," a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper created in the past decade, between 2017 and 2026.

When viewing Davis’ layered, geometric abstract compositions, coded narratives emerge that seem to map out networks, relationships, and invented geographies. Repeating lines, grids, and shapes are rigid and rigorous yet free flowing and open-ended, visually allowing multiple points of entry without settling on one specific area. Her art produces a thought-provoking and unexpected fusion of form, color, and subject matter. As an African American artist, Davis uses her practice to examine the intricate dynamics among race, history, and culture.  Referencing Marvin Gaye’s 1971 now classic protest and social justice anthem as the exhibition title, "What’s Going On?" asks visitors to contemplate themes of order and chaos, rationality and irrationality, as well as contingency and classification.  

As a long-time professor of art first at Yale School of Art and currently at Hunter College as the co-director of the MFA program, she has taught, nurtured, and inspired innumerable emerging and mid-career artists, many who have remained in the Metropolitan New York area.  Davis’ creative practice and career reflects WB’s organizational aspirations: our mission, values, and commitment to building community.

For WB, "What’s Going On?" also is a celebration of the successful completion of two years of operation that achieved proof of concept and viability and the establishment of a solid portfolio of compelling programs and exhibitions. We look forward to continuing to serve New York City, its creative community, and the public-at-large; to meaningfully advance the arts, public discourse and the cultural life of our city. We welcome new and returning visitors. Through our programming, we hope to strengthen and expand our community! Thank you for your interest. We appreciate your support!

ARTIST STATEMENT

Painting by nature is stubborn. I am trying to carve out a space that starts with fixed notions of racial perceptions and moves through contemporary modes of communication, which are fleet and fugitive, massively networked and hyper-extended. Yet paint on canvas remains for me as it ever was: static, material, refractory. Alert to the digital web in which we’re all caught, I am at the same time an ardent believer in the power of paint in all its irrefutable, sensual physicality.

Nevertheless, I draw on the scaffolding of digital life by suggesting nets, nodes and portals, careening lines and implacable firewalls. The space I hope to create is like that behind the screen of an electronic device, indefinite and extra-dimensional. But my allusions are not restricted to the digital world. My nets could as easily be those of fishing, or of construction sites, or the linear armatures of maps. Is that a pixel or a mosaic? The circuitry is not always electronic.

What is non-negotiable is the process by which the work comes about.  The paintings begin on canvas, with paint. The decisions involved—the moves taken—are concerned with the marks being fast or slow, geometric or fluid, color-saturated or not. In creating spaces that defy navigation, the paintings grow accordingly, a strictly additive process: one mark following the next, rather than arising from formal drawings or sketches. The finished work can be fairly explosive, but the paintings are slow to make. It takes me a long time to determine what goes next. Spills are allowed, considered, enhanced, even given slight depth, both illusionistic and physical. Or they are dispensed with, partially or wholly. Sometimes the process involves scraping nearly everything away, providing a new surface on which to resume, mark by mark. “Painting responds to painting; the world doesn’t help very much, but leakage occurs between the dimension.” (Carroll Dunham) Stunted narratives and wandering pictures may open a way forward, but the constants of construction become variables of thought and feeling. The medium has the last word.

By inviting a variety of associations, I hope viewers will question why they are making certain determinations, wanting things to land in a certain place. I am interested in our discomfort with flux - how we want things, including identity, to be fixed. My titles refer to emotional states (fervor, delirium), as well as cognitive positions (skepticism, mendacity). Alliteration and puns abound; these titles are suggestive rather than definitive.

I wrestle, as a woman of color, with the presumptions made about race and its relationship to cultural production. Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self—my Black self—as an expression of self-determination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance. I do not believe this position is “post-racial” since I am not sure that that is possible. I do not want to negate discussions of race and racism in art, but I do want to open the conversation by detaching Blackness from a narrow racial term, allowing it to be more pliable.

Every language is constrained, culturally and personally, and abstraction is no exception. Preferences for—and symbolic associations to—such basic elements of its vocabulary as color, line, and spatial organization shift from one place and time to another, one individual to the next. I celebrate the riotously polyglot nature of abstract painting.

Lisa Corinne Davis —

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lisa Corinne Davis (b. 1958 in Baltimore, MD) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York, NY.

Since 1993, Davis has held teaching positions at some of the top art schools in the United States; she is currently Professor of Art at Hunter College. Davis is a member of the National Academy of Design, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts, and a 2024 fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts/New York State Council on the Arts. Additionally in 2024, Davis was commissioned by the MTA Arts & Design Program to create several permanent mosaic murals for the 68th Street-Hunter College subway station, which is a site of particular resonance for Davis, having taught at Hunter College for over two decades.

She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Esther Massry Gallery, The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY; Farmer Family Gallery, The Ohio State University at Lima, Lima, OH; Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY; Lehman College Art Gallery, Lehman College, Bronx, NY; Longwood Gallery, Bronx Council on the Arts, Bronx, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Zolla/ Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL, among others.

Davis’ work has been included in institutional group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; New York Studio School, New York, NY; Oakland University Art Gallery, Oakland University, Rochester, MI; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY; and the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, among others.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE; Stanford University, Stanford, CA; U.S. Embassy, Lomé, Togo; U.S. Embassy, Yaoundé, Cameroon, and elsewhere.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn and Hudson, NY.