SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents Karon Davis Not My Circus, the solo exhibition by the winner of the 2025 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize. The Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist is best known for her dramatic installations with life-sized plaster-cast figures.

Karon Davis’s work strides the line between visual art and performance. In communion with one another, her figurative sculptures form enigmatic tableaux that suggest both personal and collective stories tied to contemporary and ancient themes, historical events, and the artist’s lived experiences. The exhibition will be in SAM’s Gwendowlyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Gallery from November 5, 2026, through July 4, 2027.

Awarded biannually since 2009 to an early to mid-career Black artist—defined loosely as an artist in the first decade of their career—the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize recognizes artists who have already contributed significantly to contemporary artistic practice and whose prominence is on the rise. Previous recipients of the prize include: Titus Kaphar (2009), Theaster Gates (2011), LaToya Ruby Frazier (2013), Lauren Halsey (2021), and Bethany Collins (2023), among others.

Davis begins each sculpture by making a plaster cast of a real person—often a friend, family member, stranger befriended on the street, or the artist herself. The final work is both rooted in the personal and, as she builds upon and transforms the figures into their roles like actors in a play, reflective of a broader collective experience. Inspired by ancient Egyptian mummification and embalming practices, each cast is covered with plaster strips, then built out with glass eyes, chicken wire, and ready-made objects before Davis forges the work into its final form.

“Karon has an extraordinary ability to draw us in with figures that feel familiar and theatrical, then reveal something much more complicated beneath the surface,” said Carrie Dedon, SAM’s Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “In Not My Circus, the spectacle of the big top becomes a way to think about performance and power. These works are mysterious, beautiful, unsettling, and deeply human, and we’re thrilled to introduce Seattle audiences to Karon’s remarkable practice.”

Not My Circus is a major new presentation conceived for the Seattle Art Museum and features three new sculptures Davis created for the show, alongside two existing sculptures and a suite of new paintings. With red and white striped paintings lining the walls of the gallery, Davis invites visitors into a big top circus. The daughter of performers, Davis draws on her family history to explore the duality of pleasure and pain inherent in all forms of entertainment, especially rife in the setting of a circus. Her life-sized sculptures each play a role in this show, including a caged lioness with the features of a woman, the ringmaster, a knife thrower’s assistant, and a weeping clown. Through these works, Davis draws parallels between the circus tent’s public personas and the hidden power dynamics of greater society.

“I’ve always been attracted to the theme of the circus, initially for the razzle dazzle: the magic, the artistry, the costumes, the craftsmanship, often serving as a lighthouse for outcasts and providing a safe haven for otherness…but then there’s the undeniable underbelly of it all which is exploitative, grotesque, dangerous, and inherently reliant on a hierarchy of power and agency,” says Davis. “I like to think of the circus as a metaphor for life. How we navigate what’s real and what’s an illusion, often created by others, sometimes even by oneself. Who can we trust? Who is really in control? Who holds the keys to the cage? The ‘not my circus’ moment is when one finally decides enough is enough—the chaos, the characters, the trickery, the control.”

Not My Circus is curated by Carrie Dedon, SAM’s Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Sandra Jackson-Dumont, former Director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, served as nominator for the award this year. During her tenure at SAM as Deputy Director for Education and Public Programs and Adjunct Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art from 2006 – 2023, Jackson-Dumont brought the Knight Lawrence Prize to national prominence and served as curator for several prize exhibitions.Karon Davis’s work strides the line between visual art and performance. In communion with one another, her figurative sculptures form enigmatic tableaux that suggest both personal and collective stories tied to contemporary and ancient themes, historical events, and the artist’s lived experiences. Davis begins each sculpture by making a plaster cast of a real person—often a friend, family member, stranger befriended on the street, or the artist herself. The final work is both rooted in the personal and, as she builds upon and transforms the figures into their roles like actors in a play, reflective of a broader collective experience.

Karon Davis (b. 1977, Reno, Nevada) creates sculptures and multimedia installations that touch on issues of history, race, and violence in the United States, using materials as varied as plaster strips, chicken wire, glass, and readymade objects. Drawing on her background in theater and film, Davis creates haunting tableaux inhabited by protagonists both historical and imagined. The figures are created using the artist's unique plaster method, amalgamations of life size casts taken from friends and family as well as her own body. The material reflects her longtime interest in ancient Egyptian mummification practices, using wrapping to memorialize different bodies and their complex histories.

Recent solo exhibitions include Wishful Thinking and Beauty Must Suffer at Salon 94, New York; No Good Deed Goes Unpunished at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, first staged in New York in 2021; and Karon Davis: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2023. In the fall of 2024 Davis was included in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for which she performed an iteration of her ballet The Death of Osiris in the exhibition space; Movements Toward Freedom at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and American Vignettes: Symbols, Society, and Satire at the Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C. That same year she was commissioned by The High Line, New York, to create Curtain Call, a monumental bronze ballerina. Davis is the 2025 recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, with a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum opening November 2026.

Davis's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (FL); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA); the Rubell Museum, Miami (FL); the Brooklyn Museum (NY); MAC3, Los Angeles (CA); and the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), among others. In 2017 Davis was the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant.