Leigh Davis is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the intersection of culture, community, and place. Her work explores grief, memory, and storytelling – how these universal experiences help define what it means to be human. Davis’s work is highly site-specific; she is drawn to contexts that present their own spirituality, using this intrinsic human quality to complement the stories she tells through her installations. Trained as a photographer, her work now ranges across media, from sculpture and installation to sound, performance, and video.
In recent years, Davis has been producing a body of work about end-of-life experiences (ELEs)—in particular, how they help us understand the emotional intricacy of grief and the ways in which we construct our beliefs about human consciousness and a possible afterlife. Her recent film project, Inquiry into the ELE (2016-2019), was exhibited at Vox Populi (Philadelphia) in April 2020. Her site-based audio installation, Vigil, featured at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn) in September 2020. Davis has shown work at Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn), BRIC (Brooklyn), EFA Project Space (New York), Oliver Art Center at CCA (Oakland), and MICA (Baltimore). She has created performances and/or events for the former Morbid Anatomy Museum, Dixon Place and Hunter East Harlem Gallery (New York).
In addition to solo work, Davis creates projects that intersect with a broad range of communities: from the Residence series created with residents of the YWCA Brooklyn, to Quiet Service, a project centering Baltimore religious institutions, to Secular Columbarium for the Island, a mythological exploration of the Southwest neighborhood in Washington, D.C. In these projects and others, a key aspect of her practice is collaboration with community partners, including Center for Urban Pedagogy, with whom she created work for the outdoor exhibition Street Value on Fulton Mall (Brooklyn) and Clermont Historic Site (NY) and Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn), where she designed site-based audio installations.
Davis is committed to creating public representations of introspective experiences, and helping to commemorate and make visible these transitory experiences which might otherwise be lost to time. In 2021, Davis was selected to be a part of the first Public Interest Design Lab fellowship in-collaboration with the DC Public Library and the Goethe-Institute, to begin the process of building Voices of Rosedale, a public art project employing oral history as a tool for deep listening. This project’s conception as a public oral history archive ties into Davis’s work about consciousness and end of life, as both are interested in the concepts of relic and afterlives—in what remains after a person or moment has passed, and how we can remember, capture, and celebrate the departed in tangible, collaborative ways.
Davis is the recipient of numerous grants, including from The Pollination Project and the New York Department of Cultural Affairs. A native of Pittsburgh, she earned her BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, GA, and her MFA from Concordia University, Montreal. She is a Part-Time Assistant Professor at Parsons the New School for Design and currently lives in Washington, D.C.