Davy Fiveash explores identity and belief through visual art
Davy Fiveash says he has always been a visual artist: He started coloring and never stopped. He is now an interdisciplinary visual artist represented by Archival Gallery in East Sacramento. He describes his art as being an exploration of “modern belief structures and how our adherence to them formulates our sense of identity and community.”
Fiveash attended The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and went to the Art Institute San Francisco for his MFA. Going to college to study art also brought him out of his isolated life growing up in the rural South.
“I grew up in Southern Georgia, about 10 minutes north of Florida, and there wasn’t a whole lot of culture,” Fiveash says. “So it was a solitary thing, until I went to school.”
In San Francisco, he met the man who later became his husband; his partner’s job as an attorney for the state of California led the couple to relocate to Sacramento about a decade ago. He says making a living as an artist here is tough, but also noted that’s true of artists living in most places. Fiveash had a show at Archival Gallery in October, but he often keeps his studio space open to visitors, including for most Second Saturdays.
His work incorporates folk art and traditional art-making, he says, along with spiritual totems, icons and symbolism to understand how human beings look at the world. Fiveash loves making “something gorgeous” but also wants to bring out thought-provoking conversations.
“A lot of my work, most recently, has been about how we identify ourselves based on belief structures — the things we believe in,” he says. “It can be religion, it can be science, it can just be day to day: Do I believe this person who’s talking to me? Half of our identities … are about the conversations we have with ourselves and with the world. So I’m really interested in what people put their faith or their belief in.”
Fiveash says throughout the course of his life as an artist, he has only made a handful of pieces that he wanted to keep in his house. One of his favorites is called “The Nightmare,” which he showed in the Mayor’s Gallery in the Office of the Mayor of Sacramento last year.
“It calms me down,” he says. “Artwork that can bring you serenity, I think, is the kind of art that I want to live with.”
“I grew up in Southern Georgia, about 10 minutes north of Florida, and there wasn’t a whole lot of culture,” Fiveash says. “So it was a solitary thing, until I went to school.”
In San Francisco, he met the man who later became his husband; his partner’s job as an attorney for the state of California led the couple to relocate to Sacramento about a decade ago. He says making a living as an artist here is tough, but also noted that’s true of artists living in most places. Fiveash had a show at Archival Gallery in October, but he often keeps his studio space open to visitors, including for most Second Saturdays.
His work incorporates folk art and traditional art-making, he says, along with spiritual totems, icons and symbolism to understand how human beings look at the world. Fiveash loves making “something gorgeous” but also wants to bring out thought-provoking conversations.
“A lot of my work, most recently, has been about how we identify ourselves based on belief structures — the things we believe in,” he says. “It can be religion, it can be science, it can just be day to day: Do I believe this person who’s talking to me? Half of our identities … are about the conversations we have with ourselves and with the world. So I’m really interested in what people put their faith or their belief in.”
Fiveash says throughout the course of his life as an artist, he has only made a handful of pieces that he wanted to keep in his house. One of his favorites is called “The Nightmare,” which he showed in the Mayor’s Gallery in the Office of the Mayor of Sacramento last year.
“It calms me down,” he says. “Artwork that can bring you serenity, I think, is the kind of art that I want to live with.”