Curator As Artist:

Recent Works by Deborah Davidson

September 17 – November 20, 2020

Image: Davidson, Dispelled Series 4-6, Color pencil on paper, 2020

In response to COVID-19, we have had to make adjustments to reduce in person visits to the gallery. This temporary visitor policy means that this exhibit will be limited to the Suffolk community by appointment. To maintain a safe environment, only four visitors will be allowed in the gallery at a time. All visitors will be required to wear a mask and practice social distancing. We look forward to the time when this temporary policy will no longer be needed.

We have created additional ways of experiencing the exhibit. We are excited to share this with you. Please visit the virtual tour and related links down below!!!

Curator Deborah Davidson wears many hats: she maintains a studio practice, and is active as a curator and educator. She is not alone in these endeavors and is in good company in the Boston arts community. Among her peers are: Danielle Krcmar a sculptor and curator who runs the Babson College Gallery, Andrew Witkin artist and co-director of the Krakow Witkin Gallery, Al Miner painter and former curator at the MFA Boston, John Guthrie painter and curator of Very Gallery, Boriana Kantcheva, painter and Gallery Coordinator, Chandler Gallery, Maud Morgan Arts, and photographer and Associate Director of Exhibitions at Lesley Art + Design Andrew Mroczek. One can also think about the parallels in many other fields, performers who are producers, actors who direct, writers who work as editors, musicians who conduct.

Davidson states that “All my endeavors apart from the studio connect back to it – I am excited by ideas and their manifestations. In all my roles – as a studio practitioner, curator and educator, I am interested in connecting visual art and ideas. There are many ways that that this is expressed. In my curatorial practice, it takes the form of exhibits organized around a theme which encompasses one or several ideas, and similarly with my organization Catalyst Conversations (which is devoted to the dialogue between art and science) artists and scientists talk to each other about a range of issues, and demonstrate the synergy between them.”

With the Dispelling Series the artist is interested in making manifest what she sees as her interior life. The drawings are about things disappearing, things ending. The paradox of making and negating occurs at the same time. They reference objects whose mass and weight are evident, adhering to the force of gravity. Yet they seem to be made of some kind of thread, intensely woven, spun around itself. The drawings are unravelling, dissipating; dispelling themselves. These pieces speak to the fraying of our lives as we have known them to be. But they speak to possibility too, and diversity, richness and poetic reassembly.

Deborah Davidson is an artist, curator and educator. She received her M.F.A. from the SMFA /Tufts University and B.A. from Binghamton University. She is founder and director of Catalyst Conversations, devoted to the dialogue between art and science. She is part of the core faculty in the MFA program at Lesley University, directs the Suffolk University Gallery and maintains a studio practice in Somerville, MA. She was the featured artist for Agni 61, the BU literary magazine. Her work is in many private and public collections, including Yale University, Wellesley College, Boston Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts and the Houghton Library, Harvard University. She has had solo exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art, Kingston Gallery, Oresman Gallery and the Chandler Gallery. Awards include Finalist, Brother Thomas Fellowship, Artist in Residence, Northeastern University, and a Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. grant.