Daina Higgins is a painter working in oil, gouache, watercolor, and spray paint. Her work has been exhibited nationally in New York, Columbus, Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in 16 solo exhibitions since 2005. In the fall of 2023 she mounted a solo exhibition at the SUNY Westchester Community College Art Gallery. In 2021 she mounted a solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Matters in Columbus, Ohio. Recent group exhibitions include Basin Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Cerulean Arts Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA), and Piano Craft Gallery (Boston, MA).

She has been featured in various publications including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtNews, The Columbus Dispatch, The Village Voice, and Create Magazine. In 2006 Roberta Smith reviewed her exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, ending her review with “[she]…creates a poetic awareness of the passage of light, moving through the world, bouncing off things and making visual experience fleetingly possible.” That same year, her graffiti was featured in Nicholas Ganz’ book Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents.

Higgins has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, three grants from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, The Artist’s Fellowship Grant, and the Silas H. Rhodes Merit Scholarship to attend The School of Visual Arts, where she earned her BFA in 2001.

Her work is in the public collections of the Columbus Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where it is on permanent view. She is a member of the Long Island City Studio collective in Queens, NY. She is represented by Contemporary Art Matters in Columbus, Ohio.

Higgins received her MFA from Queens College, City University of New York in 2009.

Statement

Over the past two decades, my work has focused on the visual and cultural identity of urban sites in the American Northeast. My painting is rooted in my emotional and perceptual responses to these specific places. I use a variety of painting techniques to convey the experience of place, as mediated through a camera lens. My paint mediums are carefully chosen to visually and culturally represent their subject. I employ a wide variety of tools and mediums including photographic reference, spray paint, oil paint, and water-based media. As an example, my photorealist spray paint paintings of forgotten urban sites and non-places stem from my youth as a graffiti artist. Typically, I paint on a scale that could be defined as “object” sized, that one could easily hold in their hand or with their arms.

I titled my recent series “Letters to Home” because each painting is formatted as a sheet of note paper. The series is spurred by a recent traumatic experience that displaced me from my home, during which I kept a diary of the events as they happened. Being uprooted has caused me to reflect on my identity as the daughter of a WWII Displaced Person and a descendant of the first white landowners of the American Southwest, and to bring these themes into my work.

Before, I was painting the external landscape with a focus on the specificity of place. Now, I look upon my “inner landscape” where there is a home that only exists in memories. The notepaper format in each painting serves as the foundation onto which brush marks can move with the urgency of a pen, setting up a tension between certainty and uncertainty. Sometimes referencing wallpaper or appearing doodled in a haze of stream-of-consciousness, I use a limited palette on pale yellow paper to slowly evoke quiet dread amidst the staid visual language of office stationery. These paintings are built up like ink drawings; each stroke is visible underneath the one atop it, the marks accumulating and deepening like memories themselves.

2018

Harris Gallery, University of LaVerne, Claremont, CA, “To Here Knows When” with Liat Yossifor, curated by Dion Johnson

Graduate Thesis Exhibition with Nathania Rubin, Klapper Hall Gallery, Queens College, CUNY

The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Philadelphia, PA "2021 Annual Domenic DiStefano Memorial Works on Paper Exhibition" Curated by Aida Birritteri

Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH, “Taking Interest: Summer in the City” virtual show

2020

Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH, "End of Summer"

Cerulean Arts Gallery & Studio, Philadelphia, PA, "The Stillness of the City"

Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, OH, "40th Anniversary of the Fine Arts Program - Fort Hayes Alumni Exhibition"

LinkPHL, Philadelphia, PA, "Art on Link" (digital art show)

The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Philadelphia, PA “157th Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings” (online)

Gallery of Art, Temple University Rome, Italy, "Tiny Biennale: 20/20 Vision" Curated by Susan Moore

2019

2015

2023

Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (third grant)

2021

The John R. Maxwell Prize (for oil painting), The Woodmere Museum’s 79^th Annual Juried Exhibition, Juror: David Wiesner

Emergency Grant, Artist's Fellowship, Inc.

2020

Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (second grant)

Coronavirus Artist's Relief Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation

Second Place Award, “157th Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings”, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Philadelphia, PA, Juried by Matthew DeProspero

2022

Artist talk, Maspeth Town Hall Senior Art Program, Queens, New York