Cy Gavin

Cy Gavin’s paintings are metaphorical interpretations of sites that have been shaped over time by human intervention and geological or cosmic phenomena. Composed with fluid, gestural brushstrokes in striking colors, they are at times monumental in scale.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1985, Gavin grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and earned his MFA in 2016 from Columbia University. In 2016 he relocated to New York’s Hudson Valley, where he currently lives and works.

In 2015, a few years after the death of his father, Gavin traveled to his ancestral homeland of Bermuda to research his family’s genealogy and the island’s history. The paintings he made during this period depict the historically significant sites of Gibbet Island, Crow Lane, and Tucker’s Town. The latter is the location of an enclave of Black Bermudans that was destroyed in 1920 to develop an exclusive golf resort. These works are marked by the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and resistance, visualizing the creation and maintenance of similar power structures in the United States.