Book: Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti Woman: Graffiti and Street Art from Five Continents, Thames & Hudson 2006
Catalog: The Woodmere Annual: 79th Annual Juried Exhibition, Juror: David Wiesner
Catalog essay: Nick Stillman, Cue Art Foundation Exhibition of 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Recipients
Katz, Ray; “Local Artist’s Work on Display at WCC Gallery”, The Viking News, October 18, 2023
Artist feature: Create Magazine, Women's Issue, March 2019
Artist feature: Dismantling the Confederacy: Paintings by Daina Higgins
Exhibition review: Charles Schultz, The Brooklyn Rail. "New Paintings" exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, February 2012
Exhibition review, Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2006
Exhibition review: Roberta Smith, Last Chance, The New York Times 2006
Exhibition review: R.C. Baker, Best in Show, The Village Voice, 2007
Exhibition review: Melissa Starker, The Columbus Alive, 2007
Exhibition review: Kaizaad Kotwal, The Columbus Dispatch, 2007
Exhibition review: Bill Mayr, The Columbus Dispatch, 2005
Exhibition review: Ann Landi, Artnews, September 2008
Exhibition review: Maureen Mullarkey, The New York Sun, 2004
Exhibition review: Maureen Mullarkey, The New York Sun, 2008
Exhibition review: "Common Objects", The New Yorker, 2007
Exhibition review: Melissa Starker, The Columbus Alive A-List, 2005
Exhibition review: Absolutearts.com, January 2005
Exhibition review: Jeanne Fryer-Kohles, The Columbus Dispatch, 2003
Exhibition Review: Nikki Davis, The Columbus Alive, 2003
Exhibition Review: Bill Mayr, The Columbus Dispatch, 2007
Daina Higgins’s early art-making experiences were as a tagger, so it’s logical that her paintings of New York cityscapes show the city’s forlorn industrial places where a graf writer’s clandestine work is usually done. Referencing her roots, she often incorporates graffiti tags into her paintings—they’re there above a busted awning in the now-demolished Shea Stadium in Shea Dusk, 2009, or scrawled on a Flushing restaurant window in Northern Boulevard, 2009. But Higgins’s recent work isn’t so much about graf in New York’s sleepy residential and industrial neighborhoods, it’s about the feel of those neighborhoods themselves. The paintings have the colors and gloss of commercial window displays. There’s a feeling of bathos in these scenes, which show the multicolored pennants of used-car parking lots, deli “grand” openings, and racetracks. A telltale canary-yellow band of police tape cordons off the scene of small-scale architectural collapse in Shea Dusk. Higgins’s New York is bordered by these colorful synthetic banners. She has described her paintings as an “archive of the margins.” While on one hand there’s a romantic flâneur quality to the idea, Higgins’s paintings starkly show the reality of twenty-first-century New York, a city pockmarked with unfinished architecture and empty lots, and characterized by a massive imbalance of wealth. “Grand old New York” only stretches so far.
Nick Stillman, 2009
Catalog essay: Nick Stillman, Cue Art Foundation Exhibition of 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Recipients