Noah Davis
New York, 533 West 19th Street
Davis’s body of work encompasses, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other, an ambitious institutional project called The Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles. The works on view will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre, featuring more than twenty of his most enduring paintings, as well as models of previous exhibitions curated by Davis at The Underground Museum. The exhibition also includes a “back room,” modeled on the working offices at The Underground Museum, featuring more paintings by Davis, as well as BLKNWS by Davis’s brother Kahlil Joseph; a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow; and Shelby George furniture, designed by Davis’s mother Faith Childs-Davis.
Helen Molesworth notes:
Noah Davis was a figurative painter and co-founder of The Underground Museum (UM) in Los Angeles. Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Davis’s paintings are a crucial part of the story of the rise of figurative and representational painting in the first two decades of the 21st century. Loneliness and tenderness suffuse his rigorously composed paintings, as do traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans. The pictures can be slightly deceptive; they are modest in scale while being emotionally ambitious. Using a notably dry paint application, and a moody palette of blues, purples, and greens, his work falls into two loose categories: there are scenes from everyday life, such as a portrait of his young son, a soldier returning from war, or a housing project designed by famed modernist architect Paul Williams. And there are paintings that traffic in magical realism, surreal images that depict the world both seen and unseen, where the presence of ancestors, ghosts, and fantasy are everywhere apparent.
Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015 (detail). © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis
Generous, curious, and energetic, Davis was also the founder, along with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, of The Underground Museum, an artist and family-run space for art and culture in Los Angeles. The UM began exceedingly modestly—Noah and Karon worked to join a series of three storefronts in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of LA. Davis’s dream was to exhibit “museum-quality” art in a working-class black and Latino neighborhood. In the early days of the UM Davis was unable to secure museum loans, so he organized exhibitions of his work, alongside that of his friends and family, and word of mouth spread about Davis’s unique curatorial gestures. In 2014 the UM entered into a partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles and Davis began organizing exhibitions using MOCA’s collection as his starting point. In the aftermath of Davis’s passing the team of family and friends he gathered continued his work at the UM, transforming it into one of the liveliest and most important gathering places in Los Angeles for artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and activists.
A select portion of the exhibition will travel to The Underground Museum, where it will be on view beginning in March, 2020. On the occasion of the exhibition, a new monograph, featuring an introduction by Molesworth and oral history interviews that she conducted with Davis’s friends, family, and colleagues, is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books and The Underground Museum.
