Deborah Dancy has taught, exhibited, and built a body of abstract painting work spanning decades. And yet, almost 50 years into her career, she decided to put down her brushes.
That choice centers “Pivot,” Dancy’s new solo exhibition opening at Buckhead’s Marcia Wood Gallery April 10.
What the pivot means
Dancy poured versus painted for this series. Layer by layer, she applied pigment and acrylic to canvases measuring 64 by 60 inches, pulling squeegees across the surfaces at intervals. “It’s a messy, chaotic, and totally unpredictable strategy,” she explained, “but it has opened up a window to something I felt was needed and has expanded what is possible.”
“Pivot” extends experimentation that Dancy first began on paper. The series scales the method, and the results carry what the gallery describes as “luminous fields that shift between depth and atmosphere.”
Read More:
• Buckhead’s Miami Circle has become the epicenter of fine art in Atlanta
• New public art initiative brings Norcross identity to life with vinyl wraps
A career-long conversation
Born in Bessemer, Alabama, and raised in Chicago, Dancy retired from the University of Connecticut in 2017 after more than three decades on the faculty. Since then, the studio has become her full-time work.
“I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, there’s a certain freedom and willingness to take chances,” Dancy said. “The push through any self-imposed boundaries has presented discoveries that have opened up new strategies for creating work.”
That willingness to push carried Dancy into the 2017 exhibition “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today,” a landmark show dedicated to the formal and historical contributions of Black women abstract artists, presented at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. For Dancy, the recognition mattered, but so did what preceded it.
“As a young painter, I searched out Black women artists who worked abstractly because I needed that connection,” she said. “I hope that I’m that for young artists who are also working abstractly.”
What she wants Atlanta to see
For audiences encountering her work for the first time, Dancy offers a simple instruction: sit with the work a while.
“I encourage viewers to stay with the paintings longer to study them and let the painting offer itself,” she said. “For those who have seen my work before, this is still me, this is where I’ve landed right now. I stepped into this. I invite the viewer to as well.”
