NEW YORK.- Lynn Davis (American, born 1944) has spent her career traveling the globe in search of the world’s most exalted sites, both man-made and natural. She captures the essence of the subjects she encounters throughout her travels in monumental, black and white photographs. RMA is pleased to have the opportunity to present 30 of her photographs in Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis, the first major exhibition of Ms. Davis’s work to appear since the late 1990s. The photographs will be combined with a selection of sculptures from the Museum’s collection chosen by Ms. Davis, pairings that reflect her intuitive response to Himalayan art as resonant with the spiritual nature of her work and that draw the historical into the present and the present into the historical.

Illumination: Photographs by Lynn Davis is curated by RMA guest curator, Charles Melcher, with Ms. Davis. Together they have selected photographs from her large body of work which reveal her unparalleled journey to capture timelessness. The exhibition spans 20 years of Ms. Davis’s travels and includes portraits, ancient architectural ruins from Nepal to Thailand, Egyptian pyramids, and the grand icebergs of the waters of Greenland. Starkly beautiful, her photographs combine the minimal and the monumental, telling, with elegance, a story of impermanence, substance, and spirit.

In her words: “We come and we go. What things were are no more. Even that which appears to be solid, you can see it before you just slipping away. The ice melts. The great cities are crushed. Its totally changed my perspective of time. But at the moment I’m seeing it, I’m just right there. I’m in just the right place, doing exactly the right thing at that given moment. That’s the gift that photography has given me.”

Ms. Davis’s photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are represented in numerous public and private collections, including The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, California.

Ms. Davis received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970. She trained with Berenice Abbott in New York. Ms. Davis had her first exhibition in 1979 at the International Center of Photography, New York, alongside her close friend, Robert Mapplethorpe.