Lisa Corinne Davis
LISA CORINNE DAVIS | MTA MOSAICS
East 68th St/Hunter College
23 JANUARY 2025
Liminal Location (2024) located at NYCT 68 St-Hunter College Station
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design
Photo courtesy of Stan Narten
LISA CORINNE DAVIS (b. 1958 in Baltimore, MD) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, New York, NY and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York, NY. Since 1993, Davis has held teaching positions at some of the top art schools in the United States; she is currently the Co-MFA Director at Hunter College. Davis is a member of the National Academy of Design and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts.
Recent solo exhibitions include “Convulsive Calculations,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; “You Are Here?,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “All Shook Up,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; “Turbulent Terrain,” Esther Massry Gallery, The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY; “No THERE there...,” Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY; and “Location... location...,” Farmer Family Gallery, The Ohio State University at Lima, Lima, OH.
Davis’ work has been included in institutional group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Dieu Donné Papermill, New York, NY; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; New York Studio School, New York, NY; Schloss Plüschow, Uphal, Germany; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY; and the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, among others.
Her work may be found in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Beinecke Collection, Yale University, New Haven, CT; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA; U.S. Embassy, Lomé, Togo; U.S. Embassy, Yaoundé, Cameroon; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
MTA Arts & Design is delighted to announce new permanent artwork by Lisa Corinne Davis at 68 St-Hunter College Station. The artwork includes three glass mosaics rendered in Davis’s abstract style. Webbed lines cross bright patches of color throughout the densely packed compositions that suggest a mapping and allude to the geographic mobility and intersection of personal narratives that occur within the station. Davis charts the vitality of this Upper East Side neighborhood as a nonlinear landscape. The mosaics convey the experience of oblique human narratives within a station and community that flourishes at a crossroads.
Tempestuous Terrain (2024) located at NYCT 68 St-Hunter College Station
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design
Photo courtesy of Stan Narten
Liminal Location (2024) located at NYCT 68 St-Hunter College Station
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design
Photo courtesy of Stan Narten
“The artwork by Lisa Corinne Davis celebrates the diverse population served by 68 St-Hunter College station, and echoed throughout the MTA system,” said Juliette Michaelson, Interim Director, MTA Arts & Design. “The new mosaics will spark the imagination of students and riders alike.”
A pair of compositions collectively titled Liminal Location, flank the seating area near the turnstiles, capturing attention as riders enter and exit the station. Another large piece, Tempestuous Terrain, features an expansive field of lines and forms ebbing and flowing on a 29.3’ long wall from floor to ceiling in the new mezzanine accessible by new stairs and elevators on 68th Street. The permanent art installation, totaling around 370 square feet, is an integral element of the improved station with various upgrades
Tempestuous Terrain (2024) located at 68 St-Hunter College Station
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design
Photo courtesy of Stan Narten
“As a graduate of Hunter’s MFA program and as a current professor, I have had many years to observe the muscular congregation of the mostly white and wealthy residents of the neighborhood with the racial, ethnic, religious, economic and political diversity of the Hunter College population.” said artist Lisa Corinne Davis. “Their interaction fills this station with ample evidence of both the realities and aspirations of social and geographic mobility. It is a place where intersecting worlds collide and coexist en route to other actual, metaphorical, or metaphysical destinations.”
Drawn from Davis’s paintings, form and content merge in these complex abstractions. The medium of mosaic is uniquely suited for the transformation of these fragments of time, space and movement into a concretely visual and visceral field. Fabricated and installed by Mayer of Munich, a combination of glass smalti, engraved glass cakes with color infill, and hand-painted glass was employed to bring the complex relationship of lines and forms into life. Entangled nets, nodes, and careening lines also seek to portray the scaffolding of digital life. The indefinite and extra-dimensional moments in the artwork allude to the liminal terrains between the digital world, tunnels and portals, and the linear armatures of maps. The result is a matrix of dynamic, wandering forms that collide, truncate, and blend, leaving room for the viewer to navigate the meaning.