Willis 'Bing' Davis: I've Known Rivers
Curated by DePauw alum Naiomy Guerrero, Willis “Bing” Davis: I’ve Known Rivers brings together a wide-ranging selection of works that highlight Davis’ lifelong artistic and cultural contributions.
Willis 'Bing' Davis: I've Known Rivers
September 2 - December 7, 2025
Peeler Art Center, Lower Level Gallery
Willis 'Bing' Davis: I’ve Known Rivers presents a wide-ranging selection of Davis’ mixed media works, photographs, ceramics, paintings, and installations. His practice is informed both by his international travels—beginning with formative visits to Ghana and Senegal in 1973—and by
his deep-rooted pride in his Dayton, Ohio community. Drawing from African art and the urban African American experience of the Midwest, Davis’s abstract works areanchored in social commentary on Black life in the United States.
The exhibition title references Langston Hughes’s 1920 poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", written when Hughes was a teenager crossing the Mississippi River by train. The poem reflects on rivers as conduits of Black expression and connection across time–as well as the history of survival for African Americans via river-scapes. Davis’ works reveal a rigorous practice of repetition, research, and citation. “I’ve Known Rivers” is the title for several of his works. Similarly, his works serve as vessels through which he invokes Afro-Indigenous spiritual traditions, testing the limits of syncretism and mythmaking.
Shaped by the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s, Davis affirms that social commentary in art is a first step toward “speaking toward a universal condition.” His Anti-Police Brutality Dance Mask series exemplifies this approach, blending African spiritual traditions with Black American cultural critique. Davis mines from a felt collective past and disrupts linear notions of time where his own subjectivity is fundamental. Through the iconography of afro-indigenous spiritual traditions, complex and paradoxical multiplicities implicit in Black hemispheric identity are laid bare. These works give form to a visual language that holds multiple chronologies and conjures up allegories based on African cosmologies.
Many of the practices Davis references are historically private, esoteric, and structured, known intimately only by a select few. This secrecy enables him not only to reflect their lore but also to intervene and reinterpret deities and spiritual figures for liberatory aims. His work engages Yoruba and Ife cosmologies, Christianity, and Afro-syncretic practices such as Santería, weaving them into a framework for his own liberatory aims and critiques. Davis is an afrofuturist who envisions new possibilities for social liberation and empowered futures for Black communities. Yet he also insists on the power of the present. Through experimentation, observation, and spiritual resonance, he creates tangible, sensory experiences that call us toward renewal, grounding, and healing.
Davis emerges as an afro-optimist: affirming both the challenges and the possibilities that shape Black life today, while gifting us with offerings to materialize a future rich with transformative potential.
About the Curator
Naiomy Guerrero is an art historian and curator specializing in Black modern and contemporary art and material culture. A DePauw University alum, she is currently an Art History Graduate Center Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Guerrero was selected for the Studio Museum in Harlem Arts Leadership Praxis 2025 and has held fellowships at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where she co-curated The Gift of Art: Permanent Collection Exhibition (2018). She has also worked with institutions including the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Twitter, Pulse Art Fair, National YoungArts Foundation, the Latinx Project at NYU, The New School, and the Walt Disney Animation Research Library.