Faculty & Staff

Biography

Israel “Izzy” Davis is an artist, educator, musician, BMX biker, and skateboarding enthusiast who lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI. After a decade of teaching at the university level he is currently focusing on his personal creative practice and has been working to produce a new body of work that utilizes ceramics, digital fabrication technologies, and mixed media. Upon receiving a series of private grants to purchase equipment and take technical courses in 3-D modeling and CNC fabrication, Davis has been busy setting up a small fab lab at his studio, Fundamental Formative Arts LLC (FUNFA). The FabLab at FUNFA currently boasts an Epilog laser etcher/cutter, a ShopBot CNC router, and a Ricoh ceramic toner laser printer.

Biography

My practice in art has been wide and varied. Currently, my work involves research into our understanding of sound and language – exploring its meaning, implications, and applications in sculpture. While I recently had a studio in Chicago, a city where I also taught at the School of the Art Institute, my search for understanding and expression in this area of art has made a winding path across the country. Truly the culmination of a life’s worth of interests, this story began in West Texas during my childhood. It would be there where the simultaneous interests in both music and art would lead me on two distinct paths: that of the ephemeral and that of the malleable. While sculpture, as the malleable, was an early love it would be some years before I studied it seriously. Music, as the ephemeral was the first and formative art form in my life. Joining an orchestra at the age of 11 as a violist, I grew to love the inexplicable, yet instantaneous, effect music had on me and those around me. This is what I seek to bring to the medium of sculpture: sympathetic resonance in form and concept.

Recent Scholarship

• 2021 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition - 2022 - SEMI-FINALIST, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C

• 2021 8th Annual Abstract Sanctuary, International Juried Exhibition, Verum Ultimum Gallery, Portland, OR

• 2020 WIDE OPEN 11, Nat’l Juried Exhibit, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, Brooklyn, NY

• 2020 No Longer and Not Yet, International Juried Exhibition, Goethe Pop Up - Das Schaufenster Gallery, Seattle, WA

• 2020 Film & New Media, National Juried Exhibition, SITE: BROOKLYN, Brooklyn, NY

• 2019 WIDE OPEN 10, Nat’l Juried Exhibit, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, Brooklyn, NY

• 2019 58th Annual Greater Michigan Art Exhibition, State Juried Exhibit, Midland, MI

• 2019 A New Media Exhibition, Nat’l Juried Exhibit, Indiana University Kokomo

• 2019 Do You Remember? Nat’l Juried Exhibition, Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA

• 2019 Positive/Negative 34, Nat’l Juried Exhibit, Slocumb Galleries, ETSU

• 2018 A Sense of Place, Nat’l Juried Exhibit, Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Atlanta, GA

• 2018 GlassAccess: Sound+Vision, Int’l Exhibit, National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia

• 2018 GlassAccess: SOUND+VISION, exhibition catalog, National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia, PA; June 2018; pgs 21-22

• 2016 "Speech from Another: The Mechanized Pursuit of the Human Voice -

Parts 1 & 2",  November Art Journal, Chicago, IL

• 2015, MFA Show, Sullivan Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

• 2013, Funny/HaHa, Base Space, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

• 2012, After the Machines, Six Summit Gallery, Ivoryton, CT

• 2009, Runner-up, Art vs. Design, New Museum, SoHo, New York, NY​

• 2009, Margaret Hexter Prize: National Sculpture Society 76th Annual Exhib., NY, NY

• 2005, Walter & Michael Lantz Prize, 1st Place: National Figure Sculpture Competition, National Sculpture Society, New York, NY​​

​Biography​
​​Dr. de Brestian got his BA in Archaeology from Boston University and his MA and PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Missouri. He is co-director of the Najerilla Valley Research Project, an international multidisciplinary project that is examining changes in urbanization, rural settlement, art and architecture in the upper Ebro valley of Spain between the 1st century BCE and the 15th century CE.​

Recent Scholarship
Publications: “Vascones and Visigoths: Creation and Transformation of Identity in Northern Spain,” in R. Mathisen and D. Schanzer, (eds.), Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World (Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity 6). (Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT 2010) 283-298.

“Interrogating the Dead: Funerary Inscriptions in Northern Iberia” in R. Häussler, (ed.), Romanisation et épigraphie. Études interdisciplinaires sur l’acculturation et l’identité dans l’Empire romain (Archéologie et Histoire Romaine, 17), (Editions Monique Mergoil: Montagnac 2007) 267-280.​