Gene Davis

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Gene Davis

American, 1920 - 1985

BiographyGene Davis was born in 1920 in Washington, D.C., where he lived for
most of his life. Prior to becoming an artist, Davis worked as a
journalist, serving as a local sportswriter and White House
Correspondent for Transradio Press, covering the end of WWII as well
as the Truman administration. Davis, a self-taught artist, began painting
professionally in 1949.
Davis’s first solo exhibition of drawings was held at the Dupont Theatre
Gallery in 1952. One year later, his first exhibition of paintings was held
at The Catholic University of America. During the same decade, Davis
was included in several important group shows including the 1964
exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized by the influential art
critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In
1965, his work was featured in the exhibition Washington Color
Painters held at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in Washington,
D.C. The exhibition, which traveled nationally, played a critical role in
garnering recognition of the Washington Color School as a regional
movement—with Davis as a key figure. The next year, Davis began
teaching at the Corcoran School of Art where he became a permanent
faculty member.
In 1974, Davis was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship and, in 1984, he was appointed the
Commissioner of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art
(then the National Museum of American Art). He passed away in his
hometown of Washington, D.C. in 1985.
His works are held in numerous collections including, among others, the
Akron Art Museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin
College, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Institute of Chicago, the
Chrysler Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Colby
College Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Dayton Art
Institute, the Denver Art Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of
Art at Cornell University, the High Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Gerald Cantor Center for Visual
Arts at Standford University, Jacksonville Art Museum, the Joslyn Art
Museum, the Mcnay Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Milwaukee Art Museum, the Mint Museum of Art, the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the
National Gallery of Art, the Norton Museum of Art, the Oklahoma City
Museum of Art, the Perez Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of
Art, the Phillips Collection, the Portland Art Museum, Princeton
University Art Museum, Rhode Island School of Design Museum,
Smith College Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Speed Art Museum, the Studio
Museum in Harlem, the Tate Gallery, the Blanton Museum of Art at the
University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan Museum of
Art, the Walker Art Center, the Kemper Art Museum at Washington
University, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and the Whitney
Museum of American Art.

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