As part of the lead up to Creating Tomorrow, a fundraising June 23rd celebration at NJPAC honoring Founding Executive Director and Artist Victor L. Davson, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art will present a free, public event, Victor Davson: Limited Engagement on May 12-21 as he steps down after thirty-three years at the helm of this landmark artist-founded, artist-centered organization. Victor Davson: Limited Engagement is a special ten-day exhibition of paintings on panel and LP vinyl record album covers and pre-publication sale of a benefit print edition by Davson.
Last year, Davson celebrated his first mid-career survey exhibition at The Ramapo College Art Galleries. The exhibition spanned 30 years and five bodies of work that move back and forth between abstraction and figuration. Currently, Davson also has a solo exhibition on view at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, 214 East 2nd Street, in New York City through May 28, 2016.
Davson’s work is heavily influenced by the anti-colonial politics of the Caribbean, and by the intellectual powerhouses of that period. These include extraordinary writers and activists like Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney. Since 1996, his series of paintings and drawings, which include the “Limbo/Anansi” drawings, “Bad Cow Comin’” paintings, and his most recent paintings on long-playing vinyl record album covers, are his attempt as an artist to negotiate the roots of identity in a terrain of loss and desire. All of these series are a response to his strong memories from his childhood in Guyana of a folk performance in which the participants masqueraded from house to house on Christmas Day. He sees these carnivalesque characters as metaphors for people of the African Diaspora who have survived because of their resiliency.
As Executive Director of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Davson has led a vital hub for creative excellence in Newark, New Jersey’s downtown arts district. Notable highlights in the organization’s history include: the founding of Emerge, a professional development program for visual artists; the founding of Aljira Design, a graphic design studio that for eighteen years earned revenue to support the organization’s exhibitions and public programs; an invitation to organize the United States representation at the IV Biennale International de Pintura in Ecuador; a major award from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—becoming one of only eight institutions nationwide selected to participate in the foundation’s second year stabilization initiative for small to midsize organizations; and designation as a Major Arts Institution by The New Jersey State Council on the Arts every year since 2003.
