UA News

The exhibits can be seen from now until March 23.

The University of Arizona Museum of Art presents “Drawings from the Typology Series,” an exhibition of recent work by critically acclaimed artist Laylah Ali and “Turner G. Davis: Fantastic Worlds,” an exhibition of recent work by Phoenix-based painter Turner G. Davis.

Both exhibits, which opened Friday and will run through March 23, are free and open to the public.

The Ali exhibition features meticulously rendered and ornately patterned black and white works on paper depicting characters gathered from an imaginary anthropology. As an extension of her distinctive gouache paintings, Ali’s new works in ink and colored pencil engage traditions of identification and classification based on observable physical traits.

“The Turner G. Davis: Fantastic Worlds” exhibition by Phoenix-based painter Turner G. Davis addresses the tensions wrought between childhood innocence and adult realities, with the result being paintings and drawings of distinctive imagination.

“Fantastic Worlds” features a variety of works and media, ranging from large charcoals and oil on canvas to small inks on paper. Unusually prolific and experimental, Davis is deeply engaged with figuration and narrative provocation. His images, whether lavishly wrought or intentionally simplified, suggest sleight of hand and cloaked truths, far away worlds of little jokes and mysteries, and childlike wonder tinged with Gothic drama. His work is enlivened by a distinctive tension: between a clear-eyed, playful innocence, and the equivocating forces of adult experience and darker imaginings. The surprise and beauty forged in that tension is the signature of Davis’s oeuvre.

Deceptively whimsical, Ali’s paintings and drawings offer keenly suggestive analyses of power, oppression and subjugation – often in ways that implicate gender and racial identity. While the artist’s earlier work (1999 to 2004) delved into the moral ambiguity and physical violence of group dynamics and power plays, Ali has recently shifted focus to the myriad ways in which identity becomes manifest – through clothing, hairstyle, skin color, physical prowess or limitation.

The UA Museum of Art encompasses one of the premier collections of European, early American and 20th-century art in the region. The Museum also presents changing exhibitions that feature the work of established as well as emerging artists. UAMA is one of only 12 museums in Arizona accredited by the American Association of Museums and one of only 750 museums nationwide that has earned this highest award for excellence in the museum field.