Patricia Davis
Patricia Davis (she/her, b. 1985) is a visual artist, curator, and educator. She earned her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (2016) and a BFA in Studio Art with concentrations in printmaking and sculpture from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (2010). During her time at UA, Davis distinguished herself as a first-generation Ronald E. McNair Scholar and a Windgate Fellow, demonstrating her commitment to both academic excellence and artistic innovation. Her international experience includes studying at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy, where she deepened her artistic practice and cultural perspective.
Davis has shown in exhibitions across the United States and internationally. Her residency at the Cedar Point Biological Station in Ogallala, NE, allowed her to engage deeply with the natural environment, influencing her creative approach. Recently, she served as the Curator and Manager of UNO Art Gallery and Collections at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she developed dynamic programming and exhibitions that fostered community engagement with the arts. In addition to her curatorial role, Davis has held significant positions at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, including Director of the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery, lecturer, and faculty advisor for the MEDICI Student Gallery.
Since moving back to Alabama in 2023, she became a member of the ALWCA. Currently based in Huntsville, Alabama, Davis teaches part-time at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and works as event coordinator for The Land Trust of North Alabama.
Outside of her professional pursuits, Davis enjoys traveling, cycling, hiking, trail running, reading for fun, all things Halloween, conducting kitchen experiments, and the thrill of keeping plants alive.
STATEMENT
There is a tension Davis returns to again and again—the pull between holding on and letting go. Her work explores a range of dualities: comfort and pressure, presence and absence, clarity and confusion. Drawn to these opposites and the ways they shape our emotional interiors, she uses abstract forms, looping structures, layered materials, and a deeply attuned sense of color to chart terrains where grief, joy, fear, and tenderness converge.
Her visual language draws from systems shaped by fragility and resilience. Organic forms—some bodily, some botanical—recur in ways that suggest both shelter and exposure. Curves, hollows, and blurred edges evoke what is felt more than seen: weight, tension, breath, dusk. Color is not secondary but structural, carrying mood and memory, capable of both soothing and unsettling. These images often slip toward abstraction, yet retain the pulse of lived sensation—emotion made physical.
Loops appear frequently in her work, resonating with the nature of thought—cyclical, unresolved, sometimes obsessive. In these repeated gestures, she finds rhythm: the rhythm of loss and renewal, of memory revisited but not resolved. Hand-drawn lines echo cursive handwriting—both a record of movement and a kind of emotional script. Their repetition holds something unfinished, a quiet insistence to remain with what resists easy naming.
Recurring motifs—spirals, grids, thresholds—serve as markers of passage, pause, or return. These liminal forms suggest the space between inside and outside, known and unknown. In these in-between places, Davis finds a visual language for the contradictions we carry.
Many of her works are on paper—a surface chosen for its intimacy and responsiveness. Others are on wood, where material resistance shifts her approach. Currently, she mostly works with gouache, ink, graphite, colored pencil, and pen, layering muted fields with vivid bursts. Her color choices are intuitive yet deliberate, shifting between harmony and dissonance, reflecting emotional states—lightness and heaviness, pressure and release, stillness and motion.
Poetry has become an integral part of her practice, offering a parallel way of tracing feeling. Davis is drawn to the weight of language—how a single phrase can carry tension, open clarity, or blur the boundary between meaning and emotion. Text weaves through her work as both structure and atmosphere—sometimes buried, sometimes legible—inviting the viewer to read, feel, or simply pause.