Deborah Dancy

Deborah Dancy, also known as Deborah Muirhead, is an abstract painter and print maker. She gained her BFA at Illinois Weslyan University in 1973, her MS in printmaking at Illinois State University in 1976, her MFA in painting at Illinois State University in 1979 and has been teaching at the University of Connecticut since 1981.

Painter and printmaker Deborah Dancy has stated that her paintings are about “color, surprise, absurdity and encounters with the self.” To that end, the artist has devoted much of her career to exploring the ways in which abstraction can become concrete. Her compositions launch a dialogue between representation and abstraction that Dancy is invested in stripping bare.

 “I construct imagined forms from my curiosity and examination of the disjointed properties that exist between natural and architectural structures. — I want to create an ambiguous yet real space where these elements collide, mutate and coexist”, explains Dancy in her artist statement. 

Deborah Dancy has an extensive list of honors and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Connecticut Commission of the Arts Artist Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts/NEA Individual Artist Grant, Nexus Press Artist Book Project Award, Visual Studies Artist, and more.

 

She has exposed solo at over a dozen galleries and museums such as Liz Harris Gallery, The Housatonic Museum, Sears-Peyton Gallery, G.R.N’Namdi Gallery, ARC Gallery, and The College of Saint Rose. Her group shows involve The Spencer Museum, The Mead Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, The Bruce Museum and the New Britain Museum of Art.

Some of her permanent collections include: The Boston Museum of Fine, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Montgomery Museum of Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum of Art, Vanderbilt University, Grinnell College, Oberlin College Allen Memorial Museum of Art, General Electric Company, Chemical Bank, and the United States Embassy in Cameroon.