Annalee Davis

Annalee Davis (born 1963) is a Barbadian-born and based visual artist who works primarily in drawing, painting, object making, installation and video. She is considered a key artist in Barbados and the wider Caribbean. She has a hybrid practice as visual artist, instigator, cultural producer, educator and writer. She works at the intersection of biography and history, focussing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados.

Early life and education

Annalee Davis was born in 1963 in St. Michael, Barbados. Annalee spent her childhood growing up on a series of sugar cane plantations- her first home was at the state owned plantation, Graeme Hall in Christ Church, the family then moved to Sandford Plantation in St. Philip and finally to Cliff Plantation in St. John where they lived for 24 years. She was the middle child in her family who were part of the ethnic white minority population. Her father who was a planter and her mother raised the large family of five children, played the piano and helped with the bookkeeping on the plantation. After attending primary and secondary school in Barbados, Davis earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland (1982-1986) with a year abroad at the Studio Art Center International (SACI) in Florence, Italy (1984-1985) and went on to the Mason Gross School for the Arts, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick campus (1987-1989) where she earned her MFA. Her art education was traditional and included a focus on drawing, painting, printmaking and art history at the undergraduate level. At the graduate level, she was part of a small group of approximately sixty students in a two year programme where she was exposed to highly regarded artists who were professors at Rutgers including Leon Golub, Joan Semmel, Emma Amos, Mel Edwards, Steve Cagan and Martha Rossler. Proximity to NYC provided regular access to a wide cross section of exhibitions in the city and an excellent visiting artist programme which included the likes of Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold and Hans Haacke offered a dynamic and challenging educational environment. On graduating from Rutgers, she returned to Barbados to take up a teaching post at The St. Michael Secondary School (1987-1989).

Career

Her more recent work has moved from painting and printmaking into installation and video art, and concerns itself with "post-plantation economies" and the transformation of Barbados from forests to sugarcane farms to a tourist destination. Much of her work uses mixed media installation to explore the Caribbean experience of identity as one that it mitigated by constant migration.[1] Many of her pieces contain a self-portrait; her style has been described as reminiscent of Frida Kahlo. Some of her works include To Hang and to Hold (1998 acrylic painting on canvas with galvanized wire) and And Knitting Them Together (1998 painting using acrylics, cotton, and paper on canvas).[2] She has also made work that explores the postcolonial relationship to food production in her native Barbados, in a 2016 performance entitled (bush) Tea Services.[3]

References
  1. "Annalee Davis by María del Carmen Cossu - BOMB Magazine". bombmagazine.org. Retrieved 14 March 2020.
  2. Davis, Annalee (2001). "Coming Home to the Self". Feminist Studies. 27 (2): 459–464. doi:10.2307/3178769. JSTOR 3178769.
  3. Connuck, Jesse. "Recipes Against Colonialism: When Food Becomes Activism". Frieze (205). ISSN 0962-0672. Retrieved 14 March 2020.

Bibliography
  • Veerle Poupeye. Caribbean Art. London; Thames and Hudson; 1998.

Further reading
  • Stephens, Melissa (10 November 2017). Cosmopolitan Creoles and Neoliberal Mobility in Annalee Davis's On the Map. ISBN 9780773552050.
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