Lexington Davis

Visiting Scholar

Lexington Davis (she/her) is a writer, curator, and art historian currently completing a Ph.D. at University of St. Andrews, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her dissertation is a transnational study exploring how 1970s feminist artists complicated the politics of domestic labor through engagement with working-class struggles. She has taught at Leiden University and has written for publications including Feminist Media Histories, Flash Art, Espace art actuel, and Metropolis M. In addition to her academic work, she has held curatorial and research positions at the New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has previously curated exhibitions at apexart, NY; Neue Galerie, Innsbruck; the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest; and the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship; a Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the Association for Art History, UK; Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds; and the Netherlands Institute in Athens. Lexington Davis’s visiting fellowship is generously supported by Het Cultuurfonds, NL.

Participating Years

2023–2024

The State. Abolitionist? Fascist? Communist? Bourgeois?

In imagining and forging the future, there is much talk of the state, but often with little detail. What should public goods consist of, and how might they be organized? Can the need for coercion (e.g., to pay taxes for public goods) be realized without the carceral and its underlying apparatuses of organized violence? What forms of sovereignty and its delegation (above or below) are possible and desirable?