Deborah Dancy “Pivot” Exhibition

Deborah Dancy
”Pivot”
New Paintings
April 10 – May 23, 2026
Marcia Wood Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, April 10, 6–8 PM

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to present Pivot, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Deborah Dancy and the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery.

In Pivot, Deborah Dancy presents a new body of paintings that marks a turning point in her practice, as layered pours of paint replace the brushwork that previously defined much of her approach. Gravity, movement, and accumulation guide the formation of each composition, allowing the works to unfold through a process that embraces fluidity, chance, and transformation.

While this direction represents a notable development in Dancy’s practice, it extends an element long present in her work. Earlier poured ink and paint works on paper now expand onto canvas, where successive layers of pigment create surfaces that appear to gather, disperse, and reconfigure across the picture plane. Veils of color gather and disperse across the surface, creating luminous fields that shift between depth and atmosphere. Rather than directing the image through deliberate brush marks, the artist engages a process in which material behavior and intuition interact, allowing form to emerge through movement, density, and transparency.

The title Pivot signals a moment of transition within the artist’s ongoing engagement with abstraction and perception. By relinquishing familiar gestures and embracing the unpredictable behavior of poured paint, Dancy enters a new phase in which the act of painting becomes a fluid exchange between artist, material, and chance. The resulting works reward sustained viewing, as shifting layers of color and light gradually reveal their spatial and atmospheric complexity.
Born in 1949 in Bessemer, Alabama, and raised in Chicago, Deborah Dancy is a nationally recognized painter whose abstract works explore perception, atmosphere, and the sensory experience of color. She retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Connecticut, where she taught in the Department of Art and Art History from 1981 to 2017.
Dancy is the recipient of numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts, a Yaddo Fellowship and the American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Fellowship. In 2018, her work was included in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and later presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Her work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, among others.
Over nearly five decades of practice, Dancy has developed a distinctive body of work that explores the expressive and perceptual possibilities of abstraction.