Michael Davis | |
---|---|
Born | 1948 Los Angeles, California |
Nationality | American |
Known for | Art |
Spouse(s) | Susan Groetsch Davis |
Website | http://www.mad-art.com/ |
Michael Davis is a Los Angeles-based artist, working in the fields of drawings, sculptures, installation art and public art. He maintains a studio in San Pedro, California. He received a Masters in Fine Art from California State University, Fullerton, and he is a grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. His work is in museums, galleries across the United States. His significant body of public art is found in rail stations, public parks and civic buildings across the United States and in Japan. [1] [2] He is the co-author and subject of PROGRESS: In Search of the American Esthetic, an exhibition that features photographs, video projections, audio and ephemera documenting artists Michael Davis and Stephen Moore’s cross-country trip by car from California to New York in 1970 and their subsequent trip traveling the same route in reversing, from New York to California. [3]
An early influence was Downey High School art teacher Ray White. White was a graduate of Chouinard Art Institute, the influential school that served as an incubator for early Los Angeles contemporary artists. White introduced Davis to the work of Italian abstract expressionist Rico Lebrun, as well as the German Bauhaus School of Art, that combined crafts and fine arts. [4]
American installation artist Robert Irwin influenced Davis in the relationship of separation of public and private space. Irwin's public art maintains a focus in creating subtle, at times vanishing environments with plain materials.
Growing up in the midst of cold war America, Davis was highly influenced by the ever-present threat of communism and imminent nuclear war. [5]
Davis was included in a compilation of Los Angeles Artists, L.A.Rising, SoCal Artists Before 1980. The compilation by Lynn Kienholz, documented the work of 500 important artists working in Los Angeles during the growth of the seminal art scene. In that book Walter Hopps wrote: "Davis's works have a strong iconographic content...not only is there an interest in architectural form, but also a kind of mythology...It's crafted and put together like something on the fringes of urban society.". [6]
Christopher Miles said of Davis: "Davis’ practice is clearly informed by a long personal history on the part of the artist with direct engagement in the discourses of conceptual art practice, situational aesthetics, semiotics, deconstruction, and the critique of representation…. Though in ways elegaic, but not sentimental or nostalgic, Davis’ work aspires to be art of his epoch, and perhaps even for his epoch–an art that engages with shared experience and endeavor, shared excitement and shared angst."
Howard N. Fox in the catalog essay, “Road Trip/Road Show” wrote: “Michael Davis’ and Stephen Moore’s “Progress, In Search of the American Esthetic”, a trek across the country from Los Angeles to New York twice – once in 1970 and again in 2005 – is a richly provocative contemporary example of the archetypal pop-culture road trip…Every nuance of bittersweet irony, of humor, or poignancy in “Progress” plays against the American citizenry’s’ received culture of respect, reverence, even awe for the nation’s natural beauty and bounty, including a long tradition in visual art and literature of celebrating the land. [7] ”
Helen Lessick of Public Art Review Magazine said "Coming of age during the minimal art movement Michael Davis was interested in using non-traditional art sites to create open public theater. He wanted to change the viewer’s passive observation of art into an active interplay outside the commercial gallery system." [8]
The Norton Simon Museum is an art museum located in Pasadena, California, United States. It was previously known as the Pasadena Art Institute and the Pasadena Art Museum and displays numerous sculptures on its grounds.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Robert W. Irwin is an American installation artist who has explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.
Wallace "Wally" Berman was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art.
The Chouinard Art Institute was a professional art school founded in 1921 by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879–1969) in Los Angeles, California. In 1961, Walt and Roy Disney guided the merger of the Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to establish the California Institute of the Arts.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, formerly known as the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA), is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, CA. As an independent and non-collecting art museum, it exhibits the work of local, national, and international contemporary artists. Until May 2015, the museum was based at the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. In May 2016, the museum announced an official name change to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and its relocation to Los Angeles's Downtown Arts District. The museum reopened to the public in September 2017.
Larry Bell is an American contemporary artist and sculptor. He is best known for his glass boxes and large-scaled illusionistic sculptures. He is a grant recipient from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his artworks are found in the collections of many major cultural institutions. He lives and works in Taos, New Mexico, and maintains a studio in Venice, California.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps brought Los Angeles post-war artists to international prominence in the 1960s.
The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery which operated from 1957 to 1966. In 1957, the gallery was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. In 1958, it was relocated across the street to 723 North La Cienega Boulevard where it remained until its closing in 1966.
The exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962 was the first museum survey of American pop art. The eight artists included were: Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, Joe Goode and Wayne Thiebaud. It was curated by Walter Hopps, who had given Andy Warhol his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the previous year. The show helped the pop art movement gain critical acceptance, preceding the Guggenheim Museum's 1963 pop art exhibition "Six Painters and the Object", curated by Lawrence Alloway.
Christopher Georgesco is an American sculptor. He is the son of modernist architect Haralamb H. Georgescu.
Ed Moses was an American artist based in Los Angeles and a central figure of postwar West Coast art.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Eric Wesley is an American artist. Wesley was born in Los Angeles, California, where he continues to live and work. He has held solo exhibitions in galleries internationally as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Foundation Morra Greco, Naples, Italy.
Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Syndell Studio was an art gallery located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, between 1954 and 1956.
Dale Brockman Davis is a Los Angeles-based African-American artist, gallerist and educator best known for his assemblage sculpture and ceramic work that addresses themes of African American history and music, especially jazz. Along with his brother, artist Alonzo Davis, he co-founded Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park. Through the gallery and his broader community work, Davis became an important promoter of African-American artists in Los Angeles.
Elyn Zimmerman is an American sculptor known for her emphasis on large scale, site specific projects and environmental art. Along with these works, Zimmerman has exhibited drawings and photographs since graduating with an MFA in painting and photography at University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. Her teachers included Robert Heineken, Robert Irwin, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Shirley Neilsen Blum, also known as Shirley Hopps is an American art historian, author, gallerist, and professor emeritus at the State University of New York, Purchase (1970–1989). She specializes in Northern Renaissance art, early Netherlandish art, and modern art. In the 1950s through the 1960s, she was active in the Los Angeles gallery scene, and she co-founded and co-ran Ferus Gallery.