Nancy Davidson is an American artist best known for large-scale inflatable sculptures regarded as hyper-feminized abstractions of the human female form. Bulbous and flesh-like, the sculptures resemble buttocks and breasts and employ erotic cultural signifiers in their shape and decoration. Davidson's work spans art media but centers around sculpture. It is largely post-minimal in character and described by commentators as providing a feminist counterpoint to the male-dominated, minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, as well as to cultural tropes involving bodies that the works themselves invoke. Of particular note are Davidson's use of humor and a sense of absurdity to seemingly both celebrate and subvert these tropes, inviting their investigation but without the seriousness and moralism that often accompany critical works. Sculpture Magazine critic Robert Raczka wrote that "The confectionary color and oversize scale" of Davidson's sculpture creates a "playfully upbeat mood that allows feminist and gender issues to rise to the surface at irregular intervals, without didacticism." The New Art Examiner's Susan Canning described it as establishing "a context where all can revel in the transgressive and liberating power of the grotesque." Davidson’s work has also been covered in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America and Der Spiegel, among other publications, and recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner and Creative Capital grants, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, among others. She lives and works in New York City.
Life and career Born and raised in Chicago, Davidson was involved in art from an early age, observing her father paint landscapes and later, attending classes at Chicago's Junior Art Institute. After receiving a bachelor's degree in education in 1965 and beginning a lifelong, concurrent career in teaching, she studied art at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA and MFA, respectively. In 1975, she launched her professional art career in Chicago, producing paintings and drawings for several group and solo exhibitions before moving to New York in 1979. These early pieces, chosen for exhibition at Chicago's Art Institute and Museum of Contemporary Art as well as at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, were positively reviewed in Artforum and Art in America. After relocating to New York, she began using textiles in her work and showed steadily throughout the 1980s—in group shows at the MCA and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and in solo exhibitions, mainly at Chicago's Marianne Deson Gallery. In the early 1990s, Davidson's artwork shifted toward sculpture and she began creating the large balloon displays for which she is best known. Following this shift, her works were selected for group exhibits at the Whitney Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, and appeared in solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1999) and Contemporary Arts Center (2001) in Cincinnati, among other venues; she also appeared in the well-known feminist exhibition, "Bad Girls West" (1994). Davidson branched out into other media during this period, including video and photography. Over the next two decades, she had solo shows at Robert Miller Gallery (2001), Betty Cuningham Gallery (2012), the Boca Raton Museum of Art (2013) and the Krannert Art Museum (2020–1). Concurrent with her professional art career, Davidson taught at a number of institutions, including University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Williams College, and State University of New York at Purchase College, where she completed a 24-year tenure.
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