Dana Davenport

Visual Description: Dana Davenport’s Box Braid Chandelier #2 is a sculptural chandelier made of synthetic hair and beads. Long black box braids create the shape of a draping chandelier. It is hung from the ceiling of the gallery just above eye level. 

Curatorial Description: Dana Davenport’s Box Braid Chandelier #2 is part of a sculptural series in which the artist creates chandeliers made from synthetic braids, hair beads, and other materials sourced from African American beauty supply stores. Davenport examines these stores as sites of interminority exchange and tension. They are commonly owned by Koreans and their products are sold primarily to African American female consumers. Davenport explores the beauty supply store in relation to her own family history and identity as a Black Korean American woman. The chandeliers stand in as a proxy for her own body and reflect upon her experience growing up between these two identities. The work blends the shared ritual acts of beading, braiding, and adorning the body.

Visual Description: Window #1 is a collage-based work that uses photomontage and beading. Two framed collages stacked on top of each other hang vertically from the ceiling. The collages include photographs from beauty supply store magazines and the artist’s personal family photos. Both include a female model posing to show off her braided hairdo and smaller cropped photos of the artist and her family. The collages are placed in a wooden frame that is akin to traditional Korean architectural motifs. Clear and purple beading drape down from the bottom collage. The photographs in the frame are translucent, allowing for light to filter though, and create a shadow in the back.

Curatorial Description: Window #1 is a new collage-based work in which Davenport continues her exploration of diasporic aesthetics. She creates a photomontage of personal family photos and photo advertisements from beauty supply magazines. They are placed within a wooden frame that emulates common motifs found in Korean architecture. The work meditates on the entanglement of such diasporic histories—illuminating the ways in which physical, architectural, and cultural spaces articulate and shape identity formation.

About

Dana Davenport (b. 1994) is a Korean and Black-American interdisciplinary artist raised in Seoul, South Korea, and currently based between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. Her work shifts between installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Within her practice, she addresses the complexities that surround interminority conflict as a foundation for envisioning her own and the collective futurity of Black and Asian peoples. Davenport's work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally including Gibney Dance, New York, NY; Watermill Center, Water Mill, NY; NYU Skirball, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; Recess Art, Brooklyn, NY; and Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, AUS, to name a few. Davenport was selected for the 2023 Bandung Residency with MoCADA and Asian American Arts Alliance and the 2021 Recess Session Residency. Davenport was awarded the 2023 Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship from the Center for Craft.