Artist Bio// ARTIST STATEMENT (C. 2026)

Davon McMillian (b. 1990, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a contemporary painter based in Los Angeles, working across painting, printmaking, and drawing. He received his BA in Studio Arts from California State University, Chico in 2020 before building a career as a marketing designer in entertainment and fashion, an experience that continues to inform his practice. I treat identity as an archive: a series of choices and experiences rather than a fixed reflection of who a person is in any single moment. It is a record often masked by the adaptations we build to protect ourselves, like encryption guarding the data within. The Black experience is a particularly layered archive, threaded with trauma, triumph, and history, one I return to often, as both a product of and a response to it.