How Noah Davis Pioneered a New Vision of Black Representation

“The practice [of painting] has a history so vast and forgotten it can only exist in the land of the spirits,” American artist Noah Davis once said. Throughout his career, Davis strived to reframe the representation of Black people through an incredible painterly blend of the real and the magical, through inserting their presence among the dreamlike qualities of daily life. He combined references from art history, modernist architecture, and talk shows of the early 1990s with personal photographs, anonymous images found at flea markets, and his own imagination. He was a painter’s painter, acutely aware of the medium’s sprawling history and technicalities; he painted because he loved it but also because he understood its nuances and power. His awareness of the medium makes his work, as fellow painter Marlene Dumas wrote, “proud, not pompous. Purposeful yet playful.”

A new exhibition, titled simply “Noah Davis,” highlights how Davis used the accepted vocabulary of painting, and art and cultural histories more generally, as a framework to offer new narratives in which the Black perspective is centered. Currently on view at Das Minsk in Potsdam, Germany (where it also marks the first time the artist’s work has been shown in the country), before traveling to the Barbican in London and L.A.’s Hammer Museum, the show is the largest international institutional survey of his work. It spans Davis’s entire oeuvre, featuring around 60 works, including paintings from his first group show in 2007, small collages he made in the hospital when battling liposarcoma, a rare form of tissue cancer, and the final paintings he made in remission up until the cancer took his life, at age 32, in 2015.

A dedicated painter

“The focus that he had was very much on Black persons as protagonists from their own perspective, from a real, everyday life, but with all of the potential and possibilities that this carries,” Paola Malavassi, the curator of the show at Das Minsk and co-initiator of the exhibition, told me. Curated chronologically, the show opens with an early work, 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), which underscores this statement: a Black man sits atop what at first glance appears to be a normal steed, his left hand fixed upon the horn of the saddle. The background is entirely black, the horse and its rider coming from and going into an abyss. Soon enough, though, the massive horn establishes itself as the center of the image, with the title referencing an 1865 military decree promising formerly enslaved families “40 acres and a mule.” When the Civil War ended, the land reserved for this purpose was returned to white owners. Today, the phrase symbolizes broken promises and reparations for Black Americans that never came. With a unicorn replacing the mule in a landscape ripe for projections, Davis seems to propose a magical ride rooted in reality but leading into a hopeful future.

Davis was born in Seattle in 1983 and began painting as a teenager. He was shaped by a formative experience seeing Kara Walker’s work at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, in 1997, later recalling that it was the first “truly radical art” he experienced. His brother, the filmmaker and artist Kahlil Joseph, has also said that Davis was so dedicated to painting that, at age 17, their parents rented an apartment for him to use as a studio. (Davis’s father was an incredibly successful lawyer, representing sports icons like Venus and Serena Williams since they were 9 and 10 years old, as well as rappers like Ludacris and Sir Mix-a-Lot.)

Davis in New York and Los Angeles

Davis was accepted into the prestigious class of Cooper Union in New York but only attended for three years. Art, he later reflected, “shouldn’t be an either-or battle between concepts versus painting. They can exist together. When [Cooper Union] force-fed us a conceptual education, I reacted against it.” After dropping out, he moved to Los Angeles where he first started working for the City of Los Angeles Public Art Division and then for legendary L.A. bookseller Dagny Corcoran’s Art Catalogues. Here, he pursued his own art education: devouring books and immersing himself in the city’s emerging, largely DIY art scene of the mid- and late 2000s.

Two defining works in the exhibition from this period are The Architect and Isis (both 2009). The former shows a figure standing behind an architectural model of a pyramidal modernist building, his face obscured by a Rothko-esque color block. The latter depicts a woman clad in a yellow leotard, arms outstretched and holding two large fans spread like wings, against the white siding of a house with a window air conditioning unit on the ground next to her. Davis made both pieces shortly after moving to the West Adams neighborhood of L.A., with his soon-to-be wife and fellow artist Karon Vereen (now Davis). The Architect references Paul Revere Williams, who was the first Black architect admitted to the American Institute of Architects in 1923 and who designed over 3,000 buildings in and around L.A., including many of the homes in the couple’s new neighborhood. Isis, meanwhile, is based on a photograph Davis took of Karon in their backyard. Both works show the possibilities inherent in his immediate surroundings, with Black protagonists moving the needle.

The Underground Museum

Near these works is an area filled with what appear to be artworks by Jeff Koons, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, and Marcel Duchamp: a Hoover in a plexiglass box, neon tubes emitting a purplish light against the wall, a pile of sand sitting in a corner made of mirrors, and a round metal bottle rack on a plinth. These are, however, imitations by Davis, made specifically for the first show at the Underground Museum (UM), an art and community center he and Karon co-founded in 2012. An important side of Davis’s practice was involving others in his community, not just representing them. Using an inheritance from Davis’s father, who had passed away the year prior from brain cancer, the couple opened UM in Arlington Heights, a historically working-class Black and Latinx neighborhood in L.A., to bring “museum-quality art” to an underserved community. And when no one would lend them artwork to exhibit, Davis took to making it himself. The lookalikes were exhibited in UM’s show “Imitation of Wealth” (2013).

In the coming years, the space became very successful: Just before Davis’s passing, they developed a partnership with MOCA Los Angeles to loan works from the collection; John Legend and Solange hosted album launches there; and Barry Jenkins hosted a special screening and Q&A during the release of Moonlight (2016), to name just a few highlights. In 2022, however, Karon made the difficult decision to close UM.