Image: ZeCora Smith. Untitled, 2019. Digital photograph.

Adrienne D. Davis Collection

WHO WE ARE

The Adrienne D. Davis Collection captures visually almost forty years of musings, meditations, and interrogations of race, representation, and Blackness. Adrienne Davis is a legal scholar of “daily life” and an impassioned collector. She is drawn to artists, principally from the Black Diaspora, as fellow creators: while she renders her vision of the world in her scholarship, they produce knowledge and world-making visually. Her collecting has grown parallel to her own scholarship and work on race.

Davis’s collection interrogates art as aesthetic objects, intellectual investigations, and political aspirations. It incorporates myriad media, generations, and aesthetic traditions. Ranging from the highly abstracted to Afro-futuristic sculpture and collage to traditional Black portraiture, the collection is unified through its themes of exploring how Black artists use their practices to explore and provoke questions of race, fracture and connection, and, ultimately, to meditate on meanings of Blackness and freedom.

Art as aesthetic objects, intellectual investigations, and political aspirations.

5 TO READ

Art Collector News, After the Fire: Peggy Cooper Cafritz and the Collection She Chose to Build Again

Tiffany E. Barber, Undesirability and Her Sisters

Adrienne D. Davis, Bad Girls of Art and Law: Abjection, Power, and Sexuality Exceptionalism in (Kara Walker’s) Art and (Janet Halley’s) Law

Erica Moiah James, After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary

St. Louis Public Radio, The Art of Collecting: Art reflects law prof's evolving views on race, gender

5 TO WATCH

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wangechi Mutu: The NewOnes will free us

Freakonomics, Season 11, Episode 21

Hirshhorn Museum, Black Art: Richard J. Powell with Sarah Lewis

Saint Louis Art Museum, Advancing Change: Retaining BIPOC Talent in Museums