VICTOR DAVSON (1948 - ) Bad Cow Comin' (Remember Martin Carter).
Oil and wax on heavy wove paper, 1999. 965x1270 mm; 38x50 inches.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
Victor Davson was born in Georgetown, Guyana and received a BFA degree from Pratt Institute (1980), Brooklyn, New York. He was the co-founder of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, with artist Carl E. Hazlewood in Newark, NJ, in 1983, and served as its founding director until 2016. Davson's thinking is heavily influenced by the anti-colonial politics of the Caribbean and the intellectuals of that period. These include writers and activists like Aimé Césaire, Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney. Since 1996, his series of paintings, Bad Cow Comin' is his attempt to negotiate the roots of identity in a terrain of loss and desire - it is a response to strong memories from his childhood in Guyana of performances in which men masqueraded from house to house on Christmas Day. These carnivalesque characters serve as metaphors for the people of the African Diaspora who survived transatlantic slavery because of their resiliency.
"The visual and the performative in the Caribbean are explicitly linked; the brilliance and innovation of the costumes are tied to the music and the meaning of the performance. Masking traditions embody both the colonizer and the colonized. In them we witness both "civilized" European and "savage" African religious expressions; the maintenance of the status quo, and the opposition to it that is expressed in ritual defiance. There is menace in the air, and there is exuberance. Davson can still hear the pitch and rattle of the kettle drum in his head." —Belinda Edmondson Ph.D.
