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American installation artist and art professor
Leila Daw (born 1940)
[1] is an American
installation artist and art professor; her work uses diverse materials to explore themes of
cartography and
feminism .
Life and work
Leila Daw received her
Masters of Fine Arts from the
St. Louis School of Fine Arts at
Washington University , and her Bachelor of Arts from
Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She was a professor of art from 1974 through 1976 at
Tusculum College ,
Maryville College , and
Forest Park Community College , from 1976 through 1990 at
Southern Illinois University , and from 1990 to 2002 at the
Massachusetts College of Art . In 2002 she retired from teaching to become a full-time artist.
[2]
[3]
Daw's works include permanent installations at the
Bradley International Airport
[4] and the
New Haven Free Public Library ;
[5] she has also participated in group exhibits at the
Contemporary Arts Center
[6]
[7] and the
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art .
[8] Daw was one of a group of artists who took part in the design of the
St. Louis MetroLink light rail system , and she became a member of the MetroLink project management team.
[9]
[10]
[11] Her work Red River (1991) at
Centenary College of Louisiana , a pattern of wildflowers in a public lawn, is imbued with symbolism of
menstruation and
menopause .
[12] Art by Daw originally commissioned for the
Massachusetts Turnpike – a set of steel
park benches painted to look like oversized folded paper maps – is on exhibit at the
DeCordova Museum in
Lincoln, Massachusetts .
[13]
[14] Other works of Daw have been more ephemeral: her Pre-Historic River Channel (1981), for instance, used
skywriting to map the course of the
Mississippi River at an earlier age when it bypassed the current location of St. Louis.
[15]
Over the years, Daw has incorporated a great diversity of materials into her work. As Joanna Frueh writes, "Since the early 1980s she has used acrylic, pencil, bronzing powders, metal leaf, Mylar, foil, and other mixed media on paper and canvas in order to create maps that replicate the terrain in regions where she has lived – St. Louis and Boston – and traveled, by car, plane, and imagination, such as the American desert West."
[16]
References
^ Love, Barbara J. (2006), "Daw, Leila (1940 –)",
Feminists who changed America, 1963–1975 , University of Illinois Press, p.
111 ,
ISBN
978-0-252-03189-2 .
^
Resume
Archived 2011-05-17 at the
Wayback Machine from artist's web site, retrieved 2010-04-17.
^
Artist information
Archived 2010-03-23 at the
Wayback Machine from Atrium Gallery, St. Louis, retrieved 2010-04-17.
^ Langdon, Philip (April 27, 2003), "Vertical Leap: Bradley Airport Reaches For The Sky With Its Expanded Terminal – But Is It Soaring Or Just Tall?",
Hartford Courant .
^
Percent for Art Program , City of New Haven, retrieved 2010-04-17.
^ Jones, Richard O. (May 16, 2008), "Maps become art in CAC exhibit",
JournalNews .
^
Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art , Contemporary Arts Center, May 17 – August 17, 2008, retrieved 2010-04-17.
^
Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape
Archived 2008-06-16 at the
Wayback Machine , Mass MoCA, May 24, 2008 – April 12, 2009, retrieved 2010-04-17.
^ Blumenfeld, Emily; Yatzeck, Tanya (1996), "Public transportation as collaborative art: MetroLink, St. Louis", Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board , 1549 : 79–84,
doi :
10.3141/1549-11 .
^ Adams, Alice (1994),
"St. Louis Metrolink: Changing the Rules of Transit Design" , Places , 9 (2) .
^ Miles, Malcolm (1997), Art, space and the city: public art and urban futures , Routledge, p. 147,
ISBN
978-0-415-13943-4 .
^ Pearsall, Marilyn (1997), The other within us: feminist explorations of women and aging , Westview Press, p. 211,
ISBN
978-0-8133-8163-3 .
^
Leila Daw
Archived 2008-05-10 at the
Wayback Machine ,
DeCordova Museum , retrieved 2010-04-17.
^ Sherman, Mary (August 5, 1999), "Pike pique – How Leila Daw's maps made a left turn to Lincoln",
Boston Herald .
^ Poleskie, Steve (1985), "Art and Flight: Historical Origins to Contemporary Works", Leonardo , 18 (2): 69–80,
doi :
10.2307/1577873 ,
JSTOR
1577873 ,
S2CID
192942081 .
^ Frueh, Joanna (Spring 1994), "The erotic as social security", Art Journal , 53 (1, Art and Old Age): 71,
doi :
10.1080/00043249.1994.10791609 ,
JSTOR
777540 .
Further reading
Schwartz, Helen (September 1977), "Leila Daw, opening new layers of women in art", Curtain Call, the Magazine of St. Louis Arts : 9 . As cited by
Heller & Heller (1995) .
Eckstrom, Kevin (March 8, 1989), "Daw's Works Reflect Topography Of Life",
St. Louis Post-Dispatch . Review of a show by Daw at the Atrium Gallery in St. Louis.
Harris, Paul A. (May 10, 1991), "Daw's Abstract 'Maps' of Metaphors",
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Temin, Christine (February 9, 1994), "Inside the Chapel, Leila Daw's great outdoors",
Boston Globe . Review of a show by Daw at Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery in Boston.
Heller, Jules; Heller, Nancy (1995),
North American women artists of the twentieth century: a biographical dictionary , Garland reference library of the humanities, vol. 1219, Garland, p.
148 ,
ISBN
978-0-8240-6049-7 .
Zimmer, William (June 29, 1997),
"Making the Leap From Science To Art and Beyond" ,
New York Times . Review of a group exhibit at the Mystic Art Association, featuring a four-part painting of
natural disasters by Daw, Doesn't Stand a Chance .
Burnham, John (January 27, 2009),
"Artist in the Galapagos: After visiting the Galapagos, Leila Daw discusses her work and the influence of her trip to the islands" , Cruising World .
Harmon, Katharine; Clemans, Gayle (2009), The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography , Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 176–177,
ISBN
978-1-56898-762-0 .
External links