DEBORAH DANCY

Artist Biography

Painter and printmaker Deborah Dancy (b. 1949, Alabama) received her MS in printmaking in 1976 and MFA in painting in 1979 from Illinois State University, as well as her BFA in 1973 from Illinois Wesleyan University. Dancy currently lives and works in Hartford, CT where she taught painting at the University of Connecticut for thirty-five years before retiring in 2017. Dancy has stated that her paintings are about “color, surprise, absurdity and encounters with the self.” To that end, the artist has devoted much of her career to exploring the ways in which abstraction can become concrete. Her thick, color-filled strokes create fragmented bursts that challenge the spatial construction of the frame and the visual space in which they exist. Her compositions launch a dialogue between representation and abstraction that Dancy has invested in stripping bare.

Dancy’s works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums and academic institutions around the world including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham AL, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Stamford, CT, Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, IA, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC, Vanderbilt University Museum, Nashville, TN, Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, Montgomery Museum of Art, Montgomery, AL, Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, United States Embassy, Cameroon, West Africa, Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, MO, Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas, NV, General Electric Company, Fairfield, CT, Pepsi Co, Ryebrook, NY, Southern New England Telephone, New Haven, CT, and many others. Dancy was the art director and illustrator of The Freedom Business by Marilyn Nelson, and was nominated for a Connecticut Children’s Book Award as an illustrator and co-author of the same publication. She has also received numerous grants and awards from her work including the Women’s Studio Workshop Residency Grant, William Randolph Hearst Artist and Writers Creative Arts Fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, The University of Connecticut Chancellor’s Research Fellowship, Nexus Press Artist Book Project Residency Award, and The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to name a few.

Artist Statement

“I make abstract work because I am interested in its ability to operate in a realm in which beauty and tension simultaneously exist without explanation or narrative. In my paintings and drawings, I employ a series of processes, scraping away, erasing, redrawing, repainting, ultimately bringing to the forefront, fragmented tangent points, tangled structures, patched, disjointed and abutted forms. These agents constitute spaces of ambiguity, places I call, the poetic realm of the incomplete, the fragment, ruin and residue of -“almost was, “and “might become,” where discovery and invention are uncovered and reconfigured; their location and specificity remain in question.”

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