Matty Davis

Matty Davis (b. 1989) is an artist and choreographer engaged in embodied explorations of the tension between our fragility and our fortitude. His work frequently uses choreography as an instrument to cultivate high-stakes relationships—ranging from the interpersonal to the cosmic—that push himself and others to creatively face and negotiate forces that drive some of the most important parts of our lives: trust, risk, love, empathy, commitment, and responsibility. Marked by full-throttle physicality and inventive movement vocabularies, his performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Jesse Zaritt).

Davis was born near Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked in the steel mills and his dad’s plane crashed, killing him and 131 other people. Visceral understandings of labor, loss, control, and bodily violence braid with Davis’s history as a multi-sport athlete, which imbued him with visceral experiences of pain, teamwork, and play. While expansive in subject matter and material outcomes— books, sculpture, drawing, and photography—his work predominantly manifests in performance and dance, which he values as communal space in which to be transformatively alive.

Over the last decade, Davis’s work has been presented by various institutions in the US and abroad, in addition to many intentional site-specific locations integral to the meaning of a given work, from mountains to hurricane-churned shorelines, living rooms to the gritty concrete of New York City. Institutionally, Davis’s work has been presented by the High Line, Frieze, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Momentary, the ICA Miller at Carnegie Mellon University, the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas, Kanal Centre Pompidou, Bozar, the Palais de Tokyo, the Max Ernst Museum, Pioneer Works, Steppenwolf  Theater, et al. He is the author of numerous books, and since 2021 has been trailblazing a new form, “performance arranged for print,” with long-standing collaborator Matt Wolff. As part of his collaborative practice, he has worked with artists including Hito Steyerl, writers including Will  Arbery and Chloé Cooper Jones, and many others across the vocational spectrum including surgeons, carpenters, aviators, athletes, and environmentalists.

Davis has participated in prominent international artist residencies, including at The Momentary,  Bentonville, Arkansas (2022); Ucross Foundation, Clearwater, Wyoming (2022); Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2020); and The Watermill Center, Watermill, New York (2016). His work has been featured and written about in BOMB, Frieze, and the New York Times Magazine. He currently teaches at Columbia University.

Artist photo credit: Jonah Rosenberg