Gene 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.