Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada) creates sculptures and multimedia installations that touch on issues of history, race, and violence in the United States, using materials as varied as plaster strips, chicken wire, glass, and readymade objects. Drawing on her background in theater and film, Davis creates haunting tableaux inhabited by protagonists both historical and imagined. The figures are created using the artist’s unique plaster method, amalgamations of life size casts taken from friends and family as well as her own body. The material reflects her longtime interest in ancient Egyptian mummification practices, using wrapping to memorialize different bodies and their complex histories.
Recent solo exhibitions include Beauty Must Suffer at Salon 94, New York; No Good Deed Goes Unpunished at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, first staged in New York in 2021; and Karon Davis: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2023. In Fall 2024 Davis was included in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for which she performed an iteration of her ballet The Death of Osiris in the exhibition space; Movements Toward Freedom at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and American Vignettes: Symbols, Society, and Satire at the Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C. That same year she was commissioned by The High Line, New York, to create Curtain Call, a monumental bronze ballerina. Davis is the 2025 recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, with a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum opening November 2026.
Davis’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (FL); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA); the Rubell Museum, Miami (FL); the Brooklyn Museum (NY); MAC3, Los Angeles (CA); and The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), among others. In 2017 Davis was the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant.