Leila Daw (born 1940)[1] is an American installation artist and art professor; her work uses diverse materials to explore themes of cartography and feminism.
[2][3] Daw's works include permanent installations at the Bradley International Airport[4] and the New Haven Free Public Library;[5] she has also participated in group exhibits at the Contemporary Arts Center[6][7] and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
[9][10][11] Her work Red River (1991) at Centenary College of Louisiana, a pattern of wildflowers in a public lawn, is imbued with symbolism of menstruation and menopause.
[12] Art by Daw originally commissioned for the Massachusetts Turnpike – a set of steel park benches painted to look like oversized folded paper maps – is on exhibit at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
As Joanna Frueh writes, "Since the early 1980s she has used acrylic, pencil, bronzing powders, metal leaf, Mylar, foil, and other mixed media on paper and canvas in order to create maps that replicate the terrain in regions where she has lived – St. Louis and Boston – and traveled, by car, plane, and imagination, such as the American desert West.