What is the relationship between improvisation and mending? Growing up as a Jazz singer, artist sonia louise davis now works with the process of tufting and the written word to create spontaneous compositions. Her embodied practice engages the theoretical elements of improvisation that appear through the tempo of the day and the rhythm of making. In this conversation, we will discuss the awareness of the edge, moving between and beyond the boundary and how all these ideas can be applied to mending as a perspective and in practice.
Speaker Bio
Born and raised in New York City, sonia louise davis is a visual artist, writer and performer. Her work is deeply invested in improvisation as embodied research. She is currently an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In February 2024 artnet named her one of 5 artists redefining New York’s art scene.
Her first institutional solo show, “to reverberate tenderly,” was recently on view at the Queens Museum, where she was a 2023 Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellow. Her newest book, “slow and soft and righteous, improvising at the end of the world (and how we make a new one),” was published in May 2021 by Co—Conspirator Press, which operates out of the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles.
In December 2021 she was invited to curate a benefit exhibition to support the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, hosted by Greene Naftali and featuring 106 artists. sonia has presented her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art; ACRE; Sadie Halie Projects; Ortega y Gasset, and Artists Space, among other venues. Residencies and fellowships include the Laundromat Project’s Create Change Fellowship; Civitella Ranieri; New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship at the International Studio & Curatorial Program; Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Artist in Residence Program; Studio Immersion Project Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; Right Now Artist Publication Grant from Women’s Studio Workshop; and Stoneleaf Retreat. She is an honors graduate of Wesleyan University (BA, African American Studies) and alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program. sonia lives and works in Harlem.
Facilitator Bio
Megumi Shauna Arai is an artist based in New York City. Investigating literal and metaphorical borders and the notion of belonging, her work sits at the intersection of textile and painting. Through the language of abstraction, by way of the physical process of folding and layering, her work focuses on points of encounter, betweenness as a practice of embodiment, and the material and immaterial as interconnected. Her work has been shown at LongHouse Reserve, Bridget Donahue Gallery, Management Gallery, Object & Thing at Madoo, Stone Barns Center, The Noyes House with Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing, Wing Luke Museum and Jacob Lawrence Gallery. Recent residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Library. Alternative pedagogy collaboration includes Field Meridians, an art-based urban ecology curriculum in Central Brooklyn and The Mothership, an eco-feminist art and ecology center founded by Yto Barrada in Tangier, Morocco. She is represented by Abby Bangser, founder of Object & Thing.
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