The Center for Black Visual Culture’s 2026–27 Distinguished Artist-Scholar-in-Residence Dejha Carrington is joined in conversation by Brooklyn-based artist and curator Damien Davis. Carrington, co-founder of the collective art-collecting model Commissioner, and Davis, whose work reimagines cultural symbols to interrogate identity and history, will explore how art collecting practices and artistic production intersect as forms of memory work. 

Dejha Carrington is an arts leader. In 2017, she co-founded Commissioner, a collaborative model and social practice that brings locals together to support contemporary artists and collect art in their cities. As Executive Director, she has cultivated a community of over 850 members to date, collectively funding more than 50 curated artist commissions in Miami, Detroit, Montréal, and Mexico City. From 2015 to 2022, she served as Vice President of Strategic Communications for YoungArts. She is CBVC’s 2026–27 Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence and teaches the Business of Art at New World School of the Arts at Miami-Dade College, dividing her time between Miami, Montréal, and New York.

Damien Davis is a Brooklyn-based artist and curator, born in Crowley, Louisiana and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. His practice explores historical representations of Blackness, unpacking the visual language of different cultures and questioning how those societies code and decode representations of race through craft, design, and digital modes of production. Using digital tools to shape layers of natural and synthetic materials, Davis composes stories through a lexicon of graphic figures and shapes that move between personal memory and chapters of human history, using color as both aesthetic and metaphor to create space for confronting bias and dehumanization in contemporary society. His work has appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, The Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as METHOD Gallery in Seattle and Biagiotti Progetto Arte in Italy. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts Administration from NYU and is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Community Engagement Grant, with residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Pilchuck Glass School. Davis is a former fellow and current advisor for the Art & Law Program in New York City. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and Vulture.