With Valentine's Day around the corner, Craft in America is pleased to announce the installation of new work in our window: a series of hand-crafted hearts made in a collaboration between Fairfax Visual Arts Magnet teacher Denise Davis and her students. Inspiration for the project came from a recent trip to Quebec, funded by the National Artist Teacher Fellowship, where Davis visited examples of ex-votos: paintings, objects or sculptures expressing thankfulness, which are most commonly found in churches. Gratefulness has been an important theme in Davis' life ever since she was laid off from her job two years ago, only to be re-hired as school began again in September.
Sacred hearts are the most common form of three-dimensional ex-voto, so to create Every Good Thing Davis created twenty seven secular cast-paper hearts and then handed one to each of her twenty seven Advanced Placement Studio Art students, who then wrote a story on the theme of giving thanks and decorated a heart to correspond to their story.
Denise Davis has worked on a variety of photography, video, sculpture and installation projects over the last several years. Her interests include cinema, psychology, pop culture and fringe sciences.
In addition to recent solo shows at Marx Zavattero in San Francisco and L2K in Los Angeles, Denise has exhibited at the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago, the Riverside Art Museum, the Chelsea Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues.
Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art, California State University Los Angeles, California State Polytechnic University Pomona, Cypress College and the Kinsey Research Institute as well as many private collections.
Denise has a MFA degree in Art/Photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Santa Monica Press published a book of her photographs, Childish Things, in 2004.
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