Alumnus Cy Gavin '16 in Exhibition at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

Visual Arts alumnus Cy Gavin ‘16 is currently in exhibition at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The exhibition is entitled The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night, and highlights two of Gavin’s pieces, entitled Idyll (Eclipse) (2017) and Untitled (Bash Bish Falls). The exhibition began on March 3, 2018 and will run through March 10, 2019.

He painted Idyll (Eclipse) following a pilgrimage to North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains to view the total eclipse. Mass MoCA describes the piece as such: "Picturing the moment when celestial bodies align and day briefly turns to night, Gavin presents the moon as a red orb, with the sun visible as a bright ring behind it. A dusky green pall darkens the sky and mountains, while electric pink foliage conveys the strange light and intoxicating effects of the astronomical event. Gavin describes the painting as a picture of the self and the earth unified in a spiritual whole."

Gavin’s paintings often employ fantastic hues, inspired by the vivid colors of Bermuda, his father’s homeland. These bright and radiant colors are often rooted in a dark ground, painted on a black and blue denim. Sabine Russ of BOMB Magazine describes Gavin’s work as “ragged landscapes in saturated colors, terrains that seem scarred by craters and fissures, and which often have a vaguely industrial feel. The earth appears open, evoking layers of the past, as if dense with data of local and global history. His landscapes frequently include the human body—as a territory that’s independent yet embedded in the depths of space and time. Large nude figures hover within kaleidoscopic, panoramic scenes, and propose a reading of color alluding to displacement, migration, and the artist’s own African-Caribbean ancestry.”

Cy Gavin was born in Pittsburgh and lives and works in New York. The painter’s recent exhibitions include Between the Waters at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a solo show, Devils’ Isle, at VNH Gallery, Paris.