The Driskell Center Welcomes Lillian O'Brien Davis, Recipient of the David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence for 2024
March 15, 2024
Winner of Creative Excellence Award in Two-Week Residency in the Archives
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Mr. David Conway
Title: Senior Archivist
Phone: 301-405-2984, Email: dconway@umd.edu
THE DRISKELL CENTER WELCOMES LILLIAN O’BRIEN DAVIS, RECIPIENT OF THE DAVID C. AND THELMA G. DRISKELL AWARD FOR CREATIVE EXCELLENCE FOR 2024
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, is pleased to welcome Lillian O’Brien Davis, who is conducting research in The Driskell Center Archives as part of a two-week residency made possible by the David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence.
Since its founding in 2001, The Driskell Center has sought to create an intellectual home for scholars seeking a fuller understanding of the American art canon. That understanding can only come about through a reckoning with the outsized accomplishments of artists of African American and African descent. That was David C. Driskell’s lifelong vision and his motivation for assembling an archive, the David C. Driskell Papers, over the course of five decades, that he would eventually donate to the Center in 2011. The Driskell Center Archives houses multiple collections, including the Faith Ringgold Study Room Collection, the Harmon Foundation Papers, the Hayes-Benjamin Papers on African American Art and Artists, the Alonzo Davis Collection, the Michael D. Harris Collection and the Robin Holder Collection. The Driskell Center’s Archives is supported in part by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
ABOUT THE AWARD
The David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence, created in partnership with the University of Maryland’s Arts for All initiative, is designed to provide emerging scholars and artists with access to The Driskell Center’s collections in order to conduct new research or create new artistic work that furthers the Center’s mission of expanding and deepening the field of African diasporic studies in the visual arts.
Lillian O’Brien Davis (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Toronto, ON. She holds a Masters of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies and a BA Hons. in the History of Art and English Literature from the University of Toronto. Lillian is currently the Curator of Collections and Contemporary Art Engagement at the Art Gallery of York University. She has curated independent projects at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto), School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba and the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina). Her writing has appeared in BlackFlash Magazine, Canadian Art online, C Magazine, Insight Magazine and RACAR art history journal. She is also currently one of two inaugural Visiting Curators at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery.
Lillian’s research interests are motivated by a broader, social momentum to redress power imbalances and historical erasures within contemporary art. Her practice follows pathways of research that explore the shifting nature of identity and consciousness, investigating experiences pertaining to the racialized or feminized “Other”—experiences often couched in secrecy, hidden from view or deemed too trivial for official record.
Lillian has received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to support work on her manuscript concerning Black women artists’ articulation of their own agency through their work. Her interest in Loïs Mailou Jones' relationship to racialized symbolism is bolstered by her opportunity to consult the David C. Driskell Papers and the Hayes-Benjamin Papers on African American Art and Artists in The Driskell Center Archives. She is also utilizing the Michael D. Harris Collection to explore ideas he advanced in his landmark work, Colored Pictures (2003), that might inform a reading of Grace Jones’ manipulation of racist imagery, appropriated from performances by Marlene Dietrich much earlier in the 20th century.
ABOUT THE DRISKELL CENTER
The Driskell Center is a creative incubator dedicated to a world where Black artists exist at its center. We invite inquiry, experimentation, and dialogue to reexamine histories and shape shared futures. All programs at The Driskell Center are free and open to the public. For further information regarding exhibitions and activities at The Driskell Center, please visit driskellcenter.umd.edu or call 301-314-2615.