Paul Davis
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Paul Davis attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and joined the influential Push Pin Studios of Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast before starting his own career in the early 1960’s.
His early paintings often were on wood, in a distinctive style that emerged from his Southwestern roots, a love of Early American painting, and an interest in Surrealism and Pop Art. Davis’s idyllic landscapes, insightful portraits, and powerful political images caught the imagination of magazine art directors and quickly became a familiar part of America’s visual landscape, and his work influenced a generation of illustrators. Davis experiments in a variety of media and styles, preferring content and inclination to guide him.
A retrospective of his work opened at The Museum of Modern Art in Kamekura, Japan in 1975, and was presented at the inaugural opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977 in Paris. His paintings and posters have been the subject of books and of gallery and museum exhibitions in the U.S. Europe and Asia, sixteen of his portraits are in the collection of the National Gallery.
Davis’s long collaboration with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater began in 1975. He was the founding art director for two magazines, Wigwag and Normal, and for the opening exhibition of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens in 1986.
He taught and lectured at the School of Visual Arts, the Columbia School of Journalism, Syracuse University and other art schools and colleges. He is in the Halls of Fame of the Art Directors Club and the Society of Illustrators; is a Fellow and Resident of the American Academy of Rome; and is a longtime member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale,
Davis has received numerous other honors, including a special Dramatists Guild award for his contribution to the American theater. He holds honorary doctorates from the School of Visual Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Lifetime Achievement Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Author Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Whenever I feel inexplicably happy and excited in New York, believing that I really am in the art capital of the world, the chances are that I have just passed a poster by Paul Davis. His work is the face of the city at its best…”
Davis began designing graphics and posters for Theatre for a New Audience in 2022.
