The Sculpture of David E. Davis: Celebrating the 20 Year Legacy

The Sculpture of David E. Davis: Celebrating the 20 Year Legacy
Main and Euclid Avenue Galleries
August 28 – October 24, 2009

Friday, August 28 5:50 to 8:00 PM Public Opening
6:30 PM Talk – David Davis Remembered, a Talk by Kathleen Cerveny, artist, poet, and The Cleveland Foundation’s Director of Evaluation and Institutional Learning and Senior Arts Advisor

The Sculpture Center, now in its 20th year, honors its founders, Cleveland sculptor David E. Davis (1921-2002) and his wife Bernice Sapirstein Davis, and celebrates their legacy to Cleveland and the region. From the early 1970s, David Davis was a towering figure in the Cleveland arts arena and threw himself with unremitting gusto and assurance into all in which he believed. The Davises founded The Sculpture Center in 1989 to support emerging Ohio sculptors in their early professional careers and to preserve and publicize public outdoor sculpture, a source of great civic pride. Bernice continues to this day to be deeply involved with the organization and its board of trustees.

Cleveland Scene Davis Review

The Sculpture of David E. Davis: Celebrating the 20 Year Legacy represents a selection of work that indicates the evolution of Davis’s conceptual ideas of three-dimensional form.  Davis’s masterful craftsmanship in hand work and fabrication and his ability to perceive the full implications and visual possibilities of an extraordinarily broad range of materials – copper, bronze, aluminum, stainless steel, Corten steel, wood, and plastic resins – are well exemplified. Davis possessed a remarkably cogent talent for perceiving the possibilities of scale, and included are many exquisitely fabricated maquettes for larger outdoor sculptures.

Davis was highly prolific and produced an enormous body of work. He created always in series, defining a general theme around which visual ideas were explored, sometimes for decades. His early work of the 1960s was organic and nature inspired, as Growth Band/Shells and Fish Series. By 1970 he had established a rigid parameter, the Harmonic Grid, based on triangles, rectangles, and circles. In the mid-1980s he moved into variations, the Family of Rectangles and the Tetrahedron Series. At the same time, he returned to his interest in the organic and produced the Arches and the Spirals, while never entirely abandoning the geometric interests. Though he worked predominately in an abstract idiom, Davis strongly believed in the spiritual and humanistic basis and influence of his artwork.

TOURS OF THE DAVIS STUDIO
Tours of the Davis Studio, by prior appointment, may be arranged with the Executive Director of The Sculpture Center. Call 216.229.6527 or email info@sculpturecenter.org.

ALSO ON VIEW THROUGH OCTOBER 24
In The Cleveland Public Library Special Collections Department, on the 3rd Floor of Main Library Building, 325 Superior Ave., NE, is the exhibition The Sketchbooks of David E. Davis: 1946-2004. These sketchbooks were donated by Bernice S. Davis to the Cleveland Public Library in 2005.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
David Davis (1921-2002), born the son of a noted Talmudic scholar in Romania, moved with his family to Ohio in the early 1930s. He attended East Technical High School and studied for two years at the then named Cleveland School of Art, where he received a full scholarship, before joining the Army in 1942. After WWII, he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in Switzerland before returning to Cleveland to complete a BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1948). He and Bernice, the daughter of the founder of American Greetings, were married in 1947. Davis worked as the supervisor of the creative department of American Greetings, rising to vice president in 1958. He also pursued a joint degree program of Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art (MA in 1965), where he discovered a passion for sculpture. In 1963, he began to work part-time in his brother’s company, Electro-General Plastics. He became a full time artist finally at the age of 47.

Davis was soon receiving important commissions for large sculpture, which can be seen around Cleveland and in other parts of the country. Davis’s first solo exhibition was at the Akron Museum of Art (1972), and through the years he showed his work extensively in Ohio, Chicago, New York, and Florida and had exhibitions in Italy and Romania. Particularly notable were one-man exhibitions at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1984) and The Butler Institute of American Art (1996, Youngstown, OH). Because of his proficiency in the fabrication of large scale sculpture, Davis was selected as the coordinator for the production of Isamu Noguchi’s Portal (1976), at the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland, and the two men became fast friends.
 
Davis was the recipient of many awards and was particularly proud of the Cleveland Arts Prize (1980). His work is held in many museum collections including those of the Akron Art Museum (OH), The Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH), the Mildred B. Putnam Sculpture Collection of Case Western Reserve University, The Cleveland Museum of Art (OH), Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, NJ), The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), The Jewish Museum (New York, NY), The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, FL), Kent State University, James Michener Collection (Kent, OH), and the Polk Museum of Art (Lakeland, FL) and in many private, public, and corporate collections, including those of the Progressive Corporation, the Cleveland Clinic, the Beachwood Library, and the David Berger memorial at the Jewish Community Center, among many others.

David and Bernice Davis founded The Sculpture Center in 1989 and the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, housed in the same complex, in 1996.

ABOUT KATHLEEN CERVENY
As a Cleveland Institute of Art student in the 1960s (BA, 1969), Kathleen Cerveny was taught sculpture of the human figure with David Davis. She remembers, “He was a kind teacher, but held high expectations and pushed us to accomplish what at first we (at least I) thought we could not.” Kathleen went on to be a powerhouse of accomplishments in the Cleveland arts and arts education world. 

She taught art at high school and university levels, worked as a ceramicist for 20 years, was WCPN’s first producer and broadcast journalist for the arts, and now is finding creative expression through poetry. She is a published writer and most recently won the third annual Haiku Death Match Championship, sponsored by Heights Arts. 

Kathleen is perhaps best known as The Cleveland Foundation’s Program Director for Arts and Culture, a position she held for 18 years, before her recent promotion to Director of Evaluation and Institutional Learning and the Senior Arts Advisor. At The Cleveland Foundation she has spearheaded all manner of studies and initiatives, including the oversight of the support for arts education in the Cleveland Municipal School District through ICARE. She designed and manages SmART in the City, a summer multi-arts camp for inner city youth. The Northeast Ohio Arts Education Association named her a Distinguished Educator for Arts Education in 2008. You can read Kathleen’s blog at The Cleveland Foundation’s website. 

Learn more about Kathleen Cerveny here.

David E. Davis
Bridge to Knowledge
1984
Aluminum with Polaine coating and carbon steel beams
12 X 60 X 9 ft.
Beachwood Branch of the Cuyahoga Country Public Library
Image courtesy of the artist

David E. Davis
Harmonic Grid LX
1977-1978
Aluminum
23 X 18 X 10 ft.
Collection of the Progressive Corporation
Image courtesy of the artist



David E. Davis at work in his studio
c. 2000
Image courtesy of The Sculpture Center



David E. Davis
Triumph
1987
Marble
18 x 18 x 9 in.
Collection of Bernice S. Davis
Image courtesy of The Sculpture Center



Installation in the Euclid Avenue Gallery, partial view
Image courtesy of studioTECHNE Architects

For more information call 216.229.6527 or go to info@sculpturecenter.org.

The Sculpture Center is a not-for-profit arts institution dedicated to the advancement of the careers of emerging Ohio sculptors and the preservation of Ohio outdoor sculpture as a means to provide support for artists and to effect the enrichment, education, enjoyment, and visual enhancement of the Cleveland community and greater region.

The Sculpture Center is generously supported by individual donors to Friends of The Sculpture Center, by studioTECHNE Architects, and by funding from the Bernice and David E. Davis Art Foundation, the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. The Sculpture Center also gratefully acknowledges the citizens of Cuyahoga County for their support through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Gallery hours: Wednesday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 pm, Saturday 12 noon to 4 pm or by prior appointment (Free Parking, Handicapped accessible)