Lee Baxter Davis

FEBRUARY 11 - APRIL 29, 2017
Visionary Texas artist Lee Baxter Davis cannot remember when he first started making pictures. When he was three, his grandfather showed him how to draw chickens. This opened the door to the "picture show" of the mind”—richly layered psychodramas chock-full of childhood memories and personal mythologies. The dense symbolism of his fine-lined watercolors recalls art by Christian mystics like Hieronymus Bosch, William Blake, and Henry Darger. 

Davis grew up in East Texas in the 1940s, at a time when abstraction defined modern art, and Jackson Pollock was a household name. He served in the Army, received an MFA from the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art, taught college art classes for over thirty years in East Texas, and became a Catholic deacon, all the while rejecting painterly abstraction for pictorial storytelling.  

Inspiring generations of artists, from comic book creators and painters to animators, Davis is one of the most influential American artists to marshal the figure back into contemporary art. His drawings are in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston, and the Arkansas Arts Center. He was one of four artists selected to represent the four major geographical areas of Texas in the Texas Biennial. This exhibition gives a hint at a pilgrim’s fantastical journey through life. 

• PRESS RELEASE

Special thanks to: 

Lee & Waynette Davis 

C. Mark Burt 

The Attaway Family