Artist: Lisa Corinne Davis

The Mayor Gallery presents an exhibition of recent paintings by Lisa Corinne Davis (Baltimore, USA), a Brooklyn-based abstract painter whose vibrant and intriguing work enigmatically resembles geographical maps, aerial views, circuit boards and coding systems.

For the past 25 years, Davis has drawn on her singular lived experience as a Black woman who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Baltimore while attending a Quaker private school to explore the complex relationship between race, culture, and systems of societal classification as a way of questioning the ingrained human impulse to categorise people.

In her work, marks and patterns in natural, warm hues that allude to the body and organic matter collide with vivid artificial colours and neon, while warped geometric grids reminiscent of genetic sequencing diagrams are layered with organic, rhythmic marks which shift and undulate to disarming and hypnotic effect.

The imagined geographies in Davis’s work are informed in part by the falsified maps that were once produced in the Soviet Union, thereby prompting a broader interrogation of information, power, and belief. In an era defined by constant surveillance, artificial intelligence, and emerging forms of techno-feudalism, her paintings raise urgent questions about truth, trust, and the precarious nature of personal identity.

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 are held 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. She has been 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 four 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. In 2025, three glass ceramic mosaics by Davis were installed at the Hunter College/68th Street subway station in New York as part of the MTA’s celebrated Arts & Design program, which comprises one of the largest and most diverse collections of public art in the world.

A renowned professor, Davis has taught at the Yale University School of Art and currently serves as Professor of Art 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 and her work have also been featured in several films, including The Art of Making It (2021) and WNET’s FLOWSTATE/North Brooklyn Artists.