Victor Davson

Victor Davson was born in 1948 in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana. His thinking is heavily influenced by the anti-colonial politics of the Caribbean and the intellectual powerhouses of that period. These include writers, poets and activists such as Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul and Orlando Patterson. His body of work includes the Limbo Anansi drawings, Bad Cow Comin’ paintings, Dub Factor paintings on long-playing vinyl record album covers and since 2020 landscapes.

Davson has exhibited widely throughout the northeast United States and in Great Britain, France, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba, National Collection of Fine Arts, Guyana, Newark Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Morris Museum. Fellowships and awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Fellowship, three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Awards.

Davson received a BFA in 1981 from Pratt Institute and cofounded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in 1983 to support artists outside the mainstream.

Solo exhibitions include In Full Bloom: Landscapes by Victor Davson, Akwaaba Gallery, Newark, NJ; The Misogyny Papers/Apology | Victor Davson, The Center for Contemporary
Art, Bedminster, NJ; Misogyny Papers/Apology | Victor Davson, Exhibition and Workspace Project, Gallery Aferro, Newark,
NJ; The Misogyny Papers/Apology | Victor Davson, Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, State University of New York, Geneseo, Online Exhibition; Victor Davson: Luminaria, Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, State University of New York, Geneseo; Victor Davson: Full Circle, Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, New York, NY; Victor Davson: Full Circle, Berrie Center Kresge and Pascal Galleries, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, NJ; Bad Cow
Comin': Recollections and Transformation, Rush Arts Gallery, New York, NY.

Group exhibitions include African American Artists & Abstraction, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; Radical Vison and Imagination: Black Abstract Art in the 21st Century, Warburton Gallery, Yonkers, NY; Wolfgang Gil: Sonic Geometries, sound installation with works from the Newark Museum of Art collection, Newark, NJ; Cicely Cottingham, Victor Davson | Book of Hours/Ours, Bertha V.B. Lederer Gallery, State University of New York, Geneseo; O...