Isis Davis-Marks (b. 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose practice navigates the porous boundaries between image and text, material and metaphor. Rooted in both visual and literary traditions, her work interrogates how narratives of race, femininity, class, and education intersect with broader philosophical and ecological questions—love, ancestry, and the passage of time. Through this expansive approach, Davis-Marks constructs a visual language that resists disciplinary confinement, situating her practice within a dialogue that spans art history, literature, and critical theory.

Central to Davis-Marks’s methodology is an exploration of the limitations of language and the capacity of images to both exceed and supplement verbal meaning. Her works often function as layered palimpsests—juxtapositions of fiber, pigment, and found materials that evoke intimate histories while engaging collective memory. The recurrent presence of plants and artifacts underscores her inquiry into temporality and ecology, casting natural and cultural forms as sites where personal and ancestral narratives converge.

Materially, Davis-Marks employs techniques historically coded as domestic—embroidery, sewing, crochet—not as mere acts of preservation but as gestures of subversion. By foregrounding textiles within a fine art context, she challenges hierarchies that have long marginalized craft-based practices and the feminized labor they signify. Her engagement with fiber is not only conceptual but deeply personal, tracing back to early lessons in dyeing, knitting, and sewing passed down from her great aunt. This intergenerational transmission becomes a locus of resistance, positioning the act of making as a form of cultural continuity and critique.

Her chromatic strategies reveal a rigorous engagement with art historical precedent, drawing on the optical experiments of Impressionism and Pointillism to create illusions of light and depth through the tactile precision of thread and fabric. In doing so, Davis-Marks reframes color theory as both a scientific and poetic system—one that animates her surfaces with a vibrational intensity while embedding them with symbolic resonance.

Beyond the studio, Davis-Marks extends her critical inquiry through writing, contributing to publications such as Frieze, The Art Newspaper, and Hyperallergic, and serving on the board of the Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art. Her scholarship bridges aesthetics and ethics, amplifying conversations around representation and the structures that shape contemporary visual culture.

Exhibited at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Yale School of Art, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Davis-Marks’s practice embodies an ethic of interdisciplinarity—an insistence that art is not an isolated gesture but an ongoing negotiation between material, history, and idea. In her hands, fiber becomes text, text becomes image, and the boundaries between them dissolve, yielding works that are at once sensorial and cerebral, deeply personal yet insistently political.