CLEVELAND, Ohio – Dexter Davis, one of the most respected contemporary artists in the city, was the victim of a road-rage shooting last month in University Circle that has temporarily halted his output, and may shape his work in the future.
In an interview with cleveland.com, Davis, 55, spoke for the first time publicly about the July 3 shooting, which left a “large caliber” round lodged in his lower back, and his plans for eventually returning to his artwork.
Doctors have told him it’s safer to leave the bullet where it is than to remove it surgically, which could cause nerve damage. They said he should recover completely, and that the bullet may eventually work its way out of his back.
“I think I feel optimistic,’' he said. “But I still have to deal with this anxiety and the psychological results of when you are involved with something so dramatic.
“I’m in pain,’' he added. “It’s sort of in and out. I wake up in the morning and sometimes my lower back and hips are really stiff. Sometimes it takes a while to get my muscles going. But from the doctor’s point of view, it’s healing pretty well.”
For Davis, the shooting represents a recurrence of trauma that has touched his life repeatedly since he grew up in the low-income, majority Black neighborhood of Hough during the 1960s and ’70s.
He was two years old during the 1966 Hough Riot. He remembers hearing constant gunfire as a child. When he was eight, a car pulled up and two white men pulled the corpse of a white man out of the trunk and dropped it on the front yard.
In a 2016 interview with Case Western Reserve University art historian Henry Adams, Davis said: “At the apartment next door to our house there was always an ambulance or a police car. People were always killing each other.”
Davis said he was jumped and beaten by gang members in 1992 while walking in Coventry in Cleveland Heights.
And now he’s been shot.
The incident was part of the surge of gun violence over the July 4 weekend that saw 27 wounded and three killed in Cleveland. Some law enforcement officials have attributed the uptick in shootings to societal tensions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
But from Davis’s perspective, the shooting was a reminder that gun violence can flare up anytime, even in University Circle, an island of cultural, medical and educational riches in the middle of a poor, racially segregated city.
“It was a regular day; everything seems to be normal and then right out of the blue it happens,’' he said. “I’m not in the ghetto or somewhere like that. I’m not where I’m not supposed to be. There’s no reason for it. And that’s what makes it scary in a way.”
Davis, who also works as a security guard at the Cleveland Museum of Art, had finished his shift at 5:20 p.m. on July 3, when he asked a colleague to give him a lift home to the nearby Larchmere neighborhood.
After stopping to use the ATM at the KeyBank on Chester Avenue, near the museum and the Cleveland Clinic, Davis said his friend, who was driving a Toyota Corolla sedan, almost collided with a black SUV on Stokes Boulevard just south of Euclid Avenue, near John Hay High School.
The SUV aggressively pursued the Toyota, in which Davis was riding in the rear seat as a health precaution because of the coronavirus pandemic. Davis said he was looking at a woman screaming at them from the open window in the rear of the SUV.
“All of a sudden they started coming faster,’' Davis said. “I think we’re in trouble,’' he recalls telling his friend. “That’s when I got hit. It was one shot. I was looking out the window. That’s when the bullet hit the back of the car door and it got me.”
His friend rushed Davis to the Cleveland Clinic emergency room, where doctors stabilized him and had him sent quickly via ambulance to the Level 1 Trauma Center at University Hospitals, several blocks away, where he was treated.
A police report recaps Davis’s account of the shooting, but does not yet include information on whether detectives have been able to locate surveillance videos from nearby buildings that might help identify the black SUV.
Davis said that after additional time off, he’ll be well enough to return to work at the museum, where his daily contact with great art has given him inspiration and joy, and provided him with numerous memorable conversations with visitors since he joined the institution in 1992.
And he hopes to resume making art, which he has made for many years as a way of coping with trauma and exorcising physical and psychic pain.
A 1990 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, he’s known for making richly textured collages incorporating images of African-style masks, disembodied eyes, imprints of open hands, and torn fragments of his own paintings and drawings.
Works such as “Twelve Dead” and “White Light,” exhibited in 2011 at the William Busta Gallery in Cleveland, refer to headlines about crime and the muzzle flash of a gun.
Davis’s work has been collected by the Cleveland museum, making him perhaps the only guard in the institution’s history to stand watch over one of his own creations. His art has also been collected by the Cleveland Clinic and Progressive Corp., and was the subject of a 2016 retrospective exhibition at Kent State University, accompanied by a 90-page catalogue written by Adams.
Davis’s work has been long championed by Busta, who said he’ll open a small office and exhibit space this fall in Collinwood’s Waterloo Arts District, where he plans to show new works by Davis.
Davis knows his work in the future will be affected by what he’s experienced, but he’s not sure how yet. He kept the white shirt he was wearing when he was shot, now stained with blood and pierced by a bullet hole. He said he may use it in a future work.
“I’m really having ideas,’' he said. “It’s something inside me that has to come out. I’ll be doing some smaller pieces. I can’t do anything big now because I can’t move my body the way I want to.”
Davis’s colleagues at the museum and friends have rallied around him since the shooting. They’ve helped with shopping or provided art materials, and they launched a GoFundMe page to help with expenses. As of mid-day Thursday, the account had reached $14,489.
Davis feels encouraged, but he speaks wearily about recovery as an all-too-familiar process.
“When you go through something like this you have to go through a whole process of healing,” he said.
As part of that process, he reflects on having lived 55 years, and muses about a simple, modest goal.
“I want to see 56,’' he said.
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Dexter Davis, a Cleveland artist all too familiar with violence, survives road-rage shooting - cleveland.com
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