Noah Davis: An Innovative Painter Who Also Reimagined Art’s Role in Community

In Painting for My Dad (2011), artist Noah Davis presents a male figure gazing over a rocky landscape beneath a star-strewn, nearly black night sky. With the figure facing away from the viewer, dressed in a worn red shirt and denim trousers and holding a lantern that offers little illumination, the artwork is solemn. Davis created it in the year his father, Keven, died from a brain tumor.

“It’s very unclear whether we are looking at the back of [Davis] or the back of his father,” notes Eleanor Nairne, head of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Davis had become a parent himself two years prior, “so there’s a chilling poignancy to it,” she adds.

This month, the Barbican in London will host the largest-ever survey of Davis’s work in a traveling exhibition that began at Das Minsk Kunsthaus in Potsdam, Germany, last fall and will move to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in June.

“There are two aspects of Noah Davis that we’re celebrating in this exhibition. One is him as an innovative painter,” explains Nairne, a former Barbican senior curator who co-organized the show at the institution, noting that Davis often spoke about “the transformative power” of painting. “The second aspect is his involvement with the Underground Museum, which he co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis” in a disadvantaged L.A. suburb.

Davis was born in Seattle in 1983. He moved to New York to study at the Cooper Union School of Art but left before graduating and relocated to Los Angeles in 2004. There he continued his own artistic journey, learning from exhibitions, catalogs, and creative individuals while working in a bookstore at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). A few years after his father’s death, Davis himself also passed away from cancer at the young age of 32, leaving behind a legacy rooted in his unshakable drive to uplift his community.

Painting for My Dad both exemplifies and contrasts with much of Davis’s oeuvre. Similar to a number of his works, the central figure is Black, the painting is emotionally complex, and the subject is turned away or ambiguous in some way. But it also atypically homes in on a personal aspect of the artist’s own life, and it uses a subdued palette that contrasts with the more vibrant work he is known for.

Like several of his works, Painting for My Dad illustrates how Davis was able to find beauty and mystery in everyday moments, through gentle yet emotionally charged imagery. Another example is The Last Barbeque (2008), which depicts a relaxed social gathering that is both familiar in concept and enigmatic in feel, within a somewhat stilted composition.

“His engagement with what is presented as reality and what is constructed or manipulated emerges throughout all the paintings in the show,” says Wells Fray-Smith, a curator at the Barbican who also worked on the exhibition. “In these works he grapples with everyday life and how it might seem truthful but also completely unbelievable or strange.”

The works create a “sense of intimacy” while giving the impression of a “half-remembered dream,” Nairne adds. 

The painting dedicated to Davis’s father also highlights how the artist had a deep knowledge of art history that he often incorporated into his works, sometimes overtly and other times more subtly. “He was influenced by a range of artists, from Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Mark Rothko to others like Romare Bearden, Caspar David Friedrich, and artists who weren’t painters but were doing things that were new or breaking with convention,” says Fray-Smith. “He loved the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, for instance—he was captured by people who somehow were able to create their own worlds.”

The influence of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818)by Caspar David Friedrich is evident in how Davis positions his subject in Painting for My Dad against a vast, rocky landscape, much as Friedrich did. “That type of parallel imagery that you might find in a historical painting and then refined in Davis’s painting recurs throughout the exhibition,” observes Fray-Smith, pointing out Davis’s 2013 series “Missing Link,” which explores Black youth culture in inner cities. “He was seeking to connect what he experienced in everyday life with all the representations that he also encountered in art history.” Fray-Smith believes the “missing link” he explored was “the Black body.”

“In this series, he reimagines paintings that we might recognize from art history, like [paintings by] Rothko or Manet, and integrates these works with Black figures,” she adds. “We get to see these figures in leisure, repose, walking through modernist landscapes.”

Los Angeles–based curator Helen Molesworth remembers that when she befriended the artist in 2014, she was taken aback by this. “The kind of current vogue or fashion for Black figurative painting that we’re living in was just not there in the way it is now,” says Molesworth, who at the time worked at MOCA, “That all happened after Noah died,” she adds, following the first major retrospective of painter Kerry James Marshall at the museum in 2017.

“When I first encountered Davis’s work, one of the things I saw was something that, to me, looked quite different from what other people were doing at that moment,” Molesworth says. “It wasn’t that Black figuration wasn’t around at all, but it tended to happen in the photographic realm, not in painting.” 

Not only was Davis keen on putting Black people front and center in his work but, when Molesworth met the artist, he was working on making art more accessible to marginalized communities, having recently opened the Underground Museum (UM) with his wife, Karon, in 2012. Using his inheritance from his father, Davis rented four storefronts in Arlington Heights, a disadvantaged Black and Latinx suburb of Los Angeles, converting them into freely accessible art spaces. (The museum ceased operation in 2022.)

Molesworth saw the UM as an artwork in itself, likening it to the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, which sees multiple art forms and experiences come together to reach an artistic goal. “It was this ‘total artwork,’ because Noah had built out the space,” she says. “He had left plans for the garden; he had made a bookstore. It was a total vibe. Even the bathrooms were filled with art,” she continues, explaining that one of the doors had a plaque on it that humorously read, ‘Blacks only.’

“When people walked into the space, they would feel it immediately—it didn’t have any of the conventions of a contemporary art space,” she adds. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s art.’” 

Davis persuaded Molesworth to lend him works from the MOCA collection to exhibit in the space, prompting her to give him a copy of MOCA’s ‘bible,’ an enormous binder that contained all the work in the institution’s permanent collection.

“He had access to all 7,000 objects,” Fray-Smith explains, noting that he curated 18 shows from the collection, though he was able to see only one to fruition before he died—a solo presentation by the South African artist William Kentridge.

“He joked that the first African to be given a solo show at the UM was a white guy,” she continues. “I think he saw the humor in that.” Not only was Davis interested in uplifting artists, but he was also keen on nurturing those who visited the UM by providing them with a range of art to look at. 

Despite centering Black artists and marginalized communities in both his art and his life, Davis downplayed the political aspects of his work, as he told Dazed in 2010. “Race plays a role in as far as my figures are Black,” he said at the time. “If I’m making any statement, it’s to just show Black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns have nothing to do with it.” That said, he never shied away from political topics or denied the power art could have in inciting change, sometimes surprising people with how he approached this in his practice.

In ​​October 2008, Davis had his first solo show at the L.A.-based gallery Roberts & Tilton (now Roberts Projects) titled “Nobody” after a Bert Williams song of the same name from 1905. By this point, Davis had become widely known for his figurative work, but instead of presenting exhibitiongoers with what they expected, he chose to show three abstract pieces in a series titled“2004” (2008). Each piece in “2004” depicts a flat geometric shape in deep purple—one of Colorado, another of New Mexico, and the last of Nevada—referencing three swing states in the 2004 presidential election between John Kerry and George W. Bush.

“He was acutely aware of the white gaze and what the predominantly white art world perhaps expected from him,” Fray-Smith explains. “He moved away from figuration and to abstraction as a way of avoiding imagery that might be racially loaded and exploring how his work might be able to be political without being so visually explicit.”

While Davis managed to carve a strong legacy for himself, even with a life cut severely short, he kept working even on his deathbed. “I probably spent more time with Noah in the hospital than I did out of the hospital at a certain point,” Molesworth says. “He was a young person with incredible ambition who knew he was gravely ill, who was trying to get as much done as he could before he died while also coming to terms with the fact that he was dying.”

She notes that Davis changed the lives of many of the people around him, including herself. When she eventually left MOCA, for example, “the way I approached the next chapter of my life was very Noah Davis–inflected,” she explains. “I thought if Noah can make the Underground Museum, I can make something of myself outside of these institutions.”

“Noah Davis,” was initiated by Barbican, London, and DAS MINSK, Potsdam, where it was on display from September 7, 2024 to January 5, 2025. The exhibition will be on view at the Barbican from February 6 through May 11, 2025 before traveling to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from June 8 through August 31, 2025.