Deborah Dancy: Pivot

Deborah Dancy’s exhibition Pivot presents a new body of paintings that marks a shift in the artist’s practice, as layered pours of paint replace the brushwork that previously defined much of her approach. Allowing gravity, movement, and accumulation to guide the image, the works unfold through a process that embraces fluidity, chance, and transformation. While this direction represents a significant development in Dancy’s practice, it extends an element that has long existed within her work. Earlier poured ink and paint works on paper now expand onto canvas, where successive layers of poured pigment create surfaces that feel atmospheric, dynamic, and continually in flux. Rather than directing the image through deliberate brush marks, the artist engages a process in which material behavior and intuition interact, allowing forms to emerge through movement, density, and transparency. The title Pivot reflects this moment of transition and renewal. By stepping away from familiar gestures and embracing a process grounded in unpredictability, Dancy opens a new path of discovery within her painting practice. The resulting works convey a heightened sense of ephemerality and sensory experience, as color and form gather, disperse, and reconfigure across the surface, revealing images that evolve through play, experimentation, and the choreography of paint itself. Deborah Dancy (b. 1949, Bessemer, Alabama; raised in Chicago) is an African American artist whose work engages abstraction through a sustained exploration of material, process, and perception. In 2017, she was included in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, a landmark exhibition dedicated to the formal and historical contributions of Black women artists to abstraction, presented at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Connecticut, where she taught in the Department of Art and Art History from 1981 to 2017. Dancy is the recipient of numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts, a Yaddo Fellowship and the American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Fellowship.  Her work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, among others. Over nearly five decades of practice, Dancy has developed a distinctive body of work that explores the expressive and perceptual possibilities of abstraction.