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Leila Daw (born 1940) is an American installation artist and art professor; her work uses diverse materials to explore themes of cartography and feminism.

Life and work

Leila Daw received her Masters of Fine Arts from the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University, and her Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She was a professor of art from 1974 through 1976 at Tusculum College, Maryville College, and Forest Park Community College, from 1976 through 1990 at Southern Illinois University, and from 1990 to 2002 at the Massachusetts College of Art. In 2002 she retired from teaching to become a full-time artist.

Daw's works include permanent installations at the Bradley International Airport and the New Haven Free Public Library; she has also participated in group exhibits at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Daw was one of a group of artists who took part in the design of the St. Louis MetroLink light rail system, and she became a member of the MetroLink project management team. Her work Red River (1991) at Centenary College of Louisiana, a pattern of wildflowers in a public lawn, is imbued with symbolism of menstruation and menopause. Art by Daw originally commissioned for the Massachusetts Turnpike – a set of steel park benches painted to look like oversized folded paper maps – is on exhibit at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Other works of Daw have been more ephemeral: her Pre-Historic River Channel (1981), for instance, used skywriting to map the course of the Mississippi River at an earlier age when it bypassed the current location of St. Louis.

Over the years, Daw has incorporated a great diversity of materials into her work. As Joanna Frueh writes, "Since the early 1980s she has used acrylic, pencil, bronzing powders, metal leaf, Mylar, foil, and other mixed media on paper and canvas in order to create maps that replicate the terrain in regions where she has lived – St. Louis and Boston – and traveled, by car, plane, and imagination, such as the American desert West."

References

1. Love, Barbara J. (2006), "Daw, Leila (1940 –)", Feminists who changed America, 1963–1975, University of Illinois Press, p. 111, ISBN 978-0-252-03189-2.
2. Resume Archived 2011-05-17 at the Wayback Machine from artist's web site, retrieved 2010-04-17.
3. Artist information Archived 2010-03-23 at the Wayback Machine from Atrium Gallery, St. Louis, retrieved 2010-04-17.
4. Langdon, Philip (April 27, 2003), "Vertical Leap: Bradley Airport Reaches For The Sky With Its Expanded Terminal – But Is It Soaring Or Just Tall?", Hartford Courant.
5. Percent for Art Program, City of New Haven, retrieved 2010-04-17.
6. Jones, Richard O. (May 16, 2008), "Maps become art in CAC exhibit", JournalNews.
7. Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Center, May 17 – August 17, 2008, retrieved 2010-04-17.
8. Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape Archived 2008-06-16 at the Wayback Machine, Mass MoCA, May 24, 2008 – April 12, 2009, retrieved 2010-04-17.
9. Blumenfeld, Emily; Yatzeck, Tanya (1996), "Public transportation as collaborative art: MetroLink, St. Louis", Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 1549: 79–84, doi:10.3141/1549-11.
10. Adams, Alice (1994), "St. Louis Metrolink: Changing the Rules of Transit Design", Places, 9 (2).
11. Miles, Malcolm (1997), Art, space and the city: public art and urban futures, Routledge, p. 147, ISBN 978-0-415-13943-4.
12. Pearsall, Marilyn (1997), The other within us: feminist explorations of women and aging, Westview Press, p. 211, ISBN 978-0-8133-8163-3.
13. Leila Daw Archived 2008-05-10 at the Wayback Machine, DeCordova Museum, retrieved 2010-04-17.
14. Sherman, Mary (August 5, 1999), "Pike pique – How Leila Daw's maps made a left turn to Lincoln", Boston Herald.
15. Poleskie, Steve (1985), "Art and Flight: Historical Origins to Contemporary Works", Leonardo, 18 (2): 69–80, doi:10.2307/1577873, JSTOR 1577873, S2CID 192942081.
16. Frueh, Joanna (Spring 1994), "The erotic as social security", Art Journal, 53 (1, Art and Old Age): 71, doi:10.1080/00043249.1994.10791609, JSTOR 777540.

Further reading

• Schwartz, Helen (September 1977), "Leila Daw, opening new layers of women in art", Curtain Call, the Magazine of St. Louis Arts: 9. As cited by Heller & Heller (1995).
• Eckstrom, Kevin (March 8, 1989), "Daw's Works Reflect Topography Of Life", St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Review of a show by Daw at the Atrium Gallery in St. Louis.
• Harris, Paul A. (May 10, 1991), "Daw's Abstract 'Maps' of Metaphors", St. Louis Post-Dispatch
• Temin, Christine (February 9, 1994), "Inside the Chapel, Leila Daw's great outdoors", Boston Globe. Review of a show by Daw at Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery in Boston.
• Heller, Jules; Heller, Nancy (1995), North American women artists of the twentieth century: a biographical dictionary, Garland reference library of the humanities, vol. 1219, Garland, p. 148, ISBN 978-0-8240-6049-7.
• Zimmer, William (June 29, 1997), "Making the Leap From Science To Art and Beyond", New York Times. Review of a group exhibit at the Mystic Art Association, featuring a four-part painting of natural disasters by Daw, Doesn't Stand a Chance.
• Burnham, John (January 27, 2009), "Artist in the Galapagos: After visiting the Galapagos, Leila Daw discusses her work and the influence of her trip to the islands", Cruising World.
• Harmon, Katharine; Clemans, Gayle (2009), The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 176–177, ISBN 978-1-56898-762-0.

External links

• Artist's web site
• Leila Daw on Flickr

• 1940 births
• American women installation artists
• American installation artists
• Artists from Charleston, West Virginia
• Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts alumni
• Wellesley College alumni
• Tusculum University faculty
• Southern Illinois University faculty
• Massachusetts College of Art and Design faculty
• Living people
• 20th-century American women artists
• 20th-century American artists
• 21st-century American women artists
• 21st-century American artists
• Washington University in St. Louis alumni