Dorothy Faison

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Dorothy A. Faison (born 1955), also known as Dorothy Ries Faison, is an American multimedia artist born in Schenectady, New York. She lived in Central and South America from age six to twelve because her stepfather worked for the United States Agency for International Development. Her family moved back to the United States in 1968 and settled in Hawaii. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1977 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Otis Art Institute in 1979. In 1990 she won the first Catharine E. B. Cox Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts and had a solo show at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. By 2017 she lived in Dordogne, France, with her filmmaker husband, Simon Holland.

Faison’s art is mainly multimedia and influenced by Latin American native cultures, especially the Aymara and Quechua, whose rituals blend Christianity, mysticism and magic. Her work Guardian of the Break in the Hawaii State Art Museum uses many media—oil, alkyd, pigments, charcoal, watercolor and dog hair on canvas—and is a large piece, about 60 inches by 110.75 inches. The central image could be a bathtub or a sarcophagus, and her symbols carry personal meanings. Her work is in public collections including the Hawaii State Art Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art.