sonia louise davis Is Immersed in the Sound

davis was participating in an outdoor program to celebrate the Museum’s recent publication on Smokehouse Associates, a group of artists who created abstract murals in the neighborhood during the late 1960s. She was the first of three presenters on that hot summer afternoon to offer a reflection on the collective, steadily grounding the audience in a deep breathing exercise before playing a moving song by the late Harlem-born jazz singer and poet Jeanne Lee.

For davis, the affinities between herself and these artists are substantial: like Smokehouse Associates, she too works in abstraction; and like Lee, davis lives in Harlem and studied jazz singing. As part of the program, she spoke to these commonalities with a tender attentiveness. Later, reading an homage to Lee, she recognized a shared desire between herself and the singer, poetically reflecting on “how incredible [it is] to call oneself an environment, how brave, how brash / how truly expansive / to be so fully immersed in the sound, to push at the edge of language, and beyond to be such an active listening being, we could all strive for something like this.”

To be fully immersed in “the sound” is an ethos that davis carries throughout her writing and visual art practice. Her signature “soft paintings,” murals, and sculptural works build from both a long-standing improvisational practice and a personal graphic notation system. She uses this notational system to create “scores” not unlike the kind used as a written representation for a musical or dance composition, or the kind used to refer to a notch or line cut into a hard surface.

davis’s scores twist, turn, warp, swivel, and joint into one another. In her meticulously organized studio, these forms appear as spirited watercolors on paper placed above the entrance, as if to offer an introduction to her process. Half-moon shapes, circles, intersecting lines, splotches of color, and ample negative space appear across eighteen sheets of notebook paper. The artist created these crayon and watercolor works, together titled “undersong (for audre),” in 2019 as an exercise in which she, guided equally by her hand and intuition, allowed the shapes to appear without premeditated or controlled vision. These same gestures inform the approach to her abstract, tufted soft paintings.

“I really appreciate the appearance of a relationship between foreground and background in these works,” the artist says, referring to emergence: utopia and visions, a tufted work featuring bursts of lavender and hunter green. To emphasize the textures and perceptual depths of the paintings, davis fills almost every crevice of her rectangular-shaped canvases with yarn made from natural or synthetic fibers gathered from different sources. The resulting abstract works are full of colorful geometric and biomorphic forms radiating with energy and movement.

Not having formally studied visual art, davis has shaped much of her language and process through her experience as an experimental vocalist. She speaks fondly of her time at Wesleyan University, where she found respite from her cerebral academic work as a Black studies major by performing with a jazz ensemble. In her last year of college, davis decided to become an artist, buoyed by the knowledge of Black women artists who came before her (she wrote her thesis on Leslie Hewitt, Lorna Simpson, and Wangechi Mutu—with honors) and the impact of local museums (“Studio Museum was early in that development. I was always coming to shows at the museum, always taking the Artist-in-Residence brochures”). While taking on administrative jobs to keep herself afloat, davis formed connections that sustained commitment to her practice. She worked for two years assisting the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University under artist and scholar Deborah Willis, who encouraged davis to acknowledge the duality of her work as an artist and administrator.

At that time, davis’s primary medium was large-format photography; however, she found herself more enthralled with “what was happening outside the frame of the picture.”1 A turning point came for the artist when she participated in the Whitney Independent Study program in 2015. There, amid lectures, seminars, and review sessions with peers, she learned to recognize improvisation as a critical practice: “I just feel like improvisation was hiding under everything I was already doing and once I had the language for it, it made everything make sense.”

Moving from language to action came quickly with her fabric works. After attending a full-day tufting workshop five years ago, the artist was hooked. She enjoyed the tactile quality of pushing the yarn through a tufting machine and viewed tufting as a suitable method for visual improvisation. Never working from a prepared sketch, she instead responds to her instincts in real time—always negotiating which color and shape will follow next.

Her time in the residency has influenced the appearance of the tufted works in unique ways. While observing the colors in emergence: utopia and visions, davis spoke to a developing throughline across her artworks from the past year. For many previous artists in residence at the museum, Harlem has served as a wellspring of inspiration and, despite being a lifelong and current Harlemite, the past year still inspired new ways of seeing for davis. As the seasons shifted, the artist made a ritual of her daily commute to the studio by taking meditative walks through St. Nicholas Park. These walks and the changing colors across the seasons inspired her practice in the studio, where the soft paintings slowly appeared to be suggestive of the spring palette and feature meandering lines. The soft paintings embrace another formative lesson from davis’s musical background; their complexity emerges from a play between synchronicity and dissonance. davis employs two types of tufting techniques that lead to the stark differences in texture and line in her work, one of which creates fluffy, plush surfaces and the other, flat, winding lines. She is mindful of the cultural associations attached to textile-based artworks, which are often pejoratively labeled as “crafts” due to their connection to women’s domestic labor and instead asserts that these remain in the realm of fine art—an accurate assertion she shares with many Black women artists working in abstraction and pushing at the boundaries of mediums.

To engage sound at the individual and collective level is an idea that davis has explored through her sculptural “sounders.” These three steel sculptures, each painted a different pastel color, resemble the shapes seen in her murals and soft paintings. She designed them as instruments to be played percussively or to project sound through an opening. The sounders offer a radical proposition to rethink instrumentation; they engage with the physics of sound, they complicate the category of music, and, perhaps most intriguingly, they invite artists to test their transferrable skills. Created for her 2023 Queens Museum exhibition to reverberate tenderly, the sculptures offered an opportunity for the artist to reintroduce sound directly into her practice by inviting musicians Sugar Vendil, Sarah Galdes, and Rena Anakwe to play the sounders. “Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time is to not be the only performer of my work, because it feels like it can get much richer with other people’s input.” She points to a yellow, curved sculpture aptly titled swoop sounder and shares more. The invitation led to pleasant surprises for davis–a performer vocalized into the bottom of swoop sounder instead of through the top opening and unexpected noises echoed from the galleries when performers used pedals to modulate the sounds of their percussion. The musicians activated the instruments in ways she couldn't have imagined on her own.

For her presentation in the Studio Museum's 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence exhibition MoMA PS1, the artist will occupy two gallery spaces on PS1’s second floor, the first of which will display several soft paintings. The adjoining gallery space will include an immersive wall drawing and feature a many voiced chorus of percussion (2024), an audio recording of a performance of her sounders. Both spaces serve to represent the correlations within her multidisciplinary practice; she calmly states the importance of “having both the ephemeral and physical present. They need each other.”

She is thankful to the team of collaborators and the crucial role of curators throughout this process. “I’ve felt in the last few years that getting to work inside of museums has been really fulfilling as a new way of collaborating, to feel like part of a team getting something going, and to feel embedded inside of a system that already has that team mentality and spirit.” Listening to davis, it seems we could all strive for something like this.