Nancy Davidson is an American artist best known for large-scale inflatable sculptures regarded as hyper-feminized abstractions of the human female form.Frankel, David. "Nancy Davidson," Artforum, February, 1999. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Karmel, Pepe. "Maux Faux," The New York Times, March 24, 1995. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Frank, Peter. "Art Picks of the Week: Nancy Davidson, Joseph Cornell," LA Weekly, September 11, 1997.Art Observed. "Miami Beach: NADA at the Deauville Resort and Hotel," December 2, 2016. Retrieved February 2, 2021. Bulbous and flesh-like, the sculptures resemble buttocks and breasts and employ erotic cultural signifiers in their shape and decoration.Madoff, Steven. "Pop Surrealism," Artforum, October, 1998. Retrieved February 2, 1998.Kimmelman, Michael. "Nancy Davidson," The New York Times, March 17, 1995. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Glueck, Grace. "Nancy Davidson," The New York Times, September 21, 2001. Retrieved February 2, 2021. 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.Sellers, Meredith. "Sexual and Playful Inflatable Bodies," Hyperallergic, May 20, 2016. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Youens, Rachel. "Nancy Davidson," The Brooklyn Rail, November, 2001. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Palon, Nadia. "At art basel miami, the future is still female," Vice, December 7, 2016. Retrieved February 2, 2021Frank, Priscilla. "How An Artist Is Using Minimalist Sculpture To Challenge Absurd Body Ideals," Huffington Post, May 31, 2016. Retrieved February 2, 2021. 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.Canning, Susan. "Nancy Davidson," New Art Examiner, Summer, 1995.Schwabsky, Barry. "Nancy Davidson," Artforum, June, 1995. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Raczka, Robert. "Nancy Davidson," Sculpture, April, 2000.McNelis, Ashley. "Nancy Davidson with Ashley McNelis," The Brooklyn Rail, April, 2016. Retrieved February 2, 2021. 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." The New Art Examiner's Susan Canning described it as establishing "a context where all can revel in the transgressive and liberating power of the grotesque."
Davidson’s work has also been covered in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America and Der Spiegel, among other publications, and recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship,Artforum. "2014 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," April 10, 2014. Retrieved February 2, 2021. Pollock-Krasner and Creative Capital grants,Artnet. "Pollock-Krasner Announces $4.3 Million in Grants," News, October 31, 2001. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Creative Capital. "Award Year 2005." Retrieved February 2, 2021. and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award,Dobrzynski, Judith. "Anonymous Gifts for Art, So Women Creating It Aren't," The New York Times, October 12, 1997. Retrieved February 2, 2021. among others.Hershenson, Roberta. "2 Women Receive Art Grants From Unknown Female Donor," The New York Times, March 22, 1998. Retrieved February 2, 2021. 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 receiving a bachelor's degree in education in 1965 and beginning a lifelong, concurrent career in teaching, she studied art at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA and MFA, respectively.Kan, Ozlem. "On 'Hive' installation with Nancy Davidson," Warhola Magazine. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Binstock, Jonathan P. The 47th Corcoran Biennial: Fantasy Underfoot, Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2002. In 1975, she launched her professional art career in Chicago, producing paintings and drawings for several group and solo exhibitions before moving to New York in 1979. These early pieces, chosen for exhibition at Chicago's Art Institute and Museum of Contemporary Art as well as at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, were positively reviewed in Artforum and Art in America.Morrison, C. L. "'The Chicago Connection,'" Artforum, February, 1977. Retrieved January 28, 2021.Morrison, C. L. "Nancy Davidson" Artforum, October, 1977. Retrieved January 28, 2021.Frueh, Johanna. "Nancy Davidson at Marianne Deson," Art in America, May, 1979. 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.
In the early 1990s, Davidson's artwork shifted toward sculpture and she began creating the large balloon displays for which she is best known.Duncan, Michael. "The Zone," Frieze, November, 1993.Davidson, Nancy. "Nancy Davidson considers an amorphous object that has shaped her career," The Architect's Newspaper, June 27, 2018. Retrieved February 2, 2021. 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;Zimmer, William. "The Push of Gravity, The Pull of Gravity," The New York Times, July 18, 1999. Retrieved February 2, 2021.John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation. "Nancy Davidson," Retrieved February 2, 2021. she also appeared in the well-known feminist exhibition, "Bad Girls West" (1994).Krannert Art Museum. Nancy Davidson, Artists. Retrieved March 4, 2021.Tucker, Marcia (ed.). Bad Girls, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994. Davidson branched out into other media during this period, including video and photography.Johnson, Ken. "Nancy Davidson," The New York Times, October 9, 1998. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Diehl, Carol. "Nancy Davidson at Dorsky," Art in America, April, 1999.Zimmer, William. "At Wesleyan: Whistler's Etchings, Contemporary Works," The New York Times, October 10, 1999. Retrieved February 2, 2021. Over the next two decades, she had solo shows at Robert Miller Gallery (2001), Betty Cuningham Gallery (2012), the Boca Raton Museum of Art (2013) and the Krannert Art Museum (2020–1).Gilmore, Kate. "Nancy Davidson with Kate Gilmore," The Brooklyn Rail, September, 2012. Retrieved February 2, 2021.Heckel, Jodi. "Ancient and modern intersect in 'Hive' exhibition at Krannert Art Museum," Illinois News Bureau, January 21, 2020. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
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.
Work In her first two decades, Davidson worked primarily in painting,Bonesteel, Michael. "Nancy Davidson at Marianne Deson," Art in America, February, 1984. frottage drawing,Morrison, C.L. "Chicago Dialectic" Artforum, February, 1978. Retrieved January 28, 2021.Village Voice. "'Physical Relief,'" December 17, 1991. and with textiles.Rubinstein, Mayer. "Nancy Davidson at Richard Anderson," Art in America, February, 1992.King, Elaine A. "Unruly Forms: A Conversation with Nancy Davidson," Sculpture, April 20, 2021. Retrieved April 22, 2021. 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.Zimmer, William. "Flights of Creation by Women and Some About Women, Too," The New York Times, February 15, 1998. Retrieved February 2, 2021. Her exhibitions are traditional in the sense that they contain discreet works, but she often displays the works in tableaux or as part of an immersive environment, in the manner of installation art.
Davidson's sculpture is said to draw on work by sculptors Donald Judd and Eva Hesse and she has cited them as influences, together with literary figures Mikhail Bakhtin and Jeanette Winterson. Her work has also been called "Rabelaisian," after French writer François Rabelais, whose writings enacted social critique through their satirical use of bawdy humor and the grotesque.
The subject matter and materials used—together with the size and minimal character of the pieces—have led commentators to describe Davidson's work as a markedly feminist response to the masculine, minimalist sculpture of the 1960s.Creative Capital. "Nancy Davidson: When Deep Research Is Needed to Make Sculpture," December 2, 2019. Retrieved February 2, 2021. 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. Davidson has confirmed the intentionality of this contrast in interviews, stating that she designed one of her largest pieces, Double Exposure (2003), to be a feminine counterpoint to artist Ronald Bladen's giant "X" sculpture (The X, 1965),Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, p. 165. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001. Retrieved February 2, 2021. which, in 1967, occupied the same atrium space at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for which Davidson's piece was commissioned. Critics also see a subversive feminist ethos in the way Davidson's art employs cultural tropes involving bodies and desirability, noting that any subversion is achieved subtly. Art in America'''s Travis Diehl wrote that "[Davidson's] work is light and playful, as well as genuinely erotic, which makes our involvement with it more experiential than intellectual. Her sly seduction shows us to be objectifiers as well as objectified, illuminating our roles as both accomplices and victims."
Brightly colored, large, and bearing references to pop-culture icons like Elvis Presley and Mae West, the sculptures appear to celebrate the exaggerated forms of culturally idealized bodies while simultaneously undermining the forces behind them. Artforum's David Frankel wrote, "there is a certain hilarity and even joyfulness in their comically rounded bulges and furrows, in their colors and fussy corsetry," further noting that Davidson's work "examines the roles imposed on women in the theater of male expectation while also allowing a space for women to act in that theater without being limited by it—in effect, by taking over the play." Humor, limitation and the transcendence of limitation are common themes in her art, and the artist has cited the latter—which she calls "unruliness"—as being a key inspiration to her work.
Early balloon sculptures