Visitors this month to the Arts Council of Princeton have had the chance to immerse themselves in a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Victor Davson, curated by Juno Zago. Now they can hear from the artist himself at an artist talk on Saturday, October 25, from 3 to 4 p.m. The exhibition continues through Saturday, November 8.
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.
Davson’s artistic vision was shaped in his early childhood in Guyana, a country marked by the confluence of Native, African, Indian, Chinese, and European cultures. His formative years were steeped in both urban and rural life, travels into the rainforest, and the anti-colonial struggle for independence in the 1960s. Influenced by writers, poets, and activists including Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul and Orlando Patterson, Davson has continued to draw on this wellspring of history, fable, myth, and political activism throughout his career.
In 2020, during the stillness of the COVID-19 lockdown, Davson turned to landscape as his muse. With fresh eyes, he began to see the natural surroundings of his New Jersey home on the Lenape Trail, with a commanding view of the first ridge of the Watchung mountains from his backyard. His observations sparked a new awareness of the interconnectedness of human life and the natural world: “A sense of panic shot through me,” Davson recalls. “In prioritizing myself, I had overlooked the vital contribution of trees — not only to my life, but to the sustainability of all life on the planet.”
Initially working at the intersection of representation and abstraction, Davson created landscapes rooted in physical locations. By 2023, however, his paintings began to evolve beyond place, transformed through a variety of means, methods, and materials into surfaces evocative of the territory of sensation and the terrain of memory.
To learn more about Davson and his work, visit his website: www.victordavson.com.
Victor Davson Artist Talk, Arts Council of Princeton, 102 Witherspoon Street, Princeton. Saturday, October 25, 3 to 4 p.m. Free. www.artscouncilofprinceton.org.
