The Life and Art of Noah Davis at the Hammer Museum

Presented chronologically, the show’s first gallery features pictures of random strangers sourced from old photos. “When I first started painting, I wanted to paint these anonymous moments and make them permanent,” he says. “I was going to swap meets, and they had these photo bins, and there are thousands and thousands of photographs that are just anonymous.”

A scrappy Cooper Union dropout and former MOCA bookstore clerk, he depicts quotidian moments in paintings like “Single Mother with Father out of the Picture”, a girl with a cast on her arm next to her mom on the couch, and “Bad Boy for Life”, a woman spanking a boy bent over her lap. 

“You rarely see Black people represented independent of the civil rights issues or social problems that go on in the States. I’m looking to move on from that stage,” he says in the catalog that accompanies the show. In the film, he elaborates, “I wanted to make something that was extremely normal. I want Black people to be normal, that was my goal. We are normal, right? But I want it to be more magical. I don't want it to be stuck in the alley.”

Magic features in paintings like “40 Acres and a Unicorn”, a boy riding the mythical beast, set against an all-black background. Bleakness presides, perhaps commenting on the Reconstruction measure guaranteeing 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves, a promise unfulfilled under Jim Crow. The same bleakness persists throughout the show– facial features blurred, often nightmarishly so, as in the works of Francis Bacon, an influence. 

“At this early stage in his paintings, you see an artist coming to understand their relationship to paint. They are more layered and mannered. We can watch how the material almost dilutes over the span of a very short period of time,” notes Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi.

None is more touching than the painting of artist Karon Vereen (daughter of Ben Vereen), later Karon Davis. Taken from a photo, she is posed by the house, holding like wings a pair of large fans. It was around the time she got Davis interested in Ancient Egypt which became the theme for a show he did at Tilton Gallery in a NYC townhouse. He called the painting “Isis” after the goddess of magic, motherhood, healing, and death. Noah and Karon were married in 2008 and soon baby Moses was born. 

A close friend and fraternity brother of Davis’ father, Keven, was the grandson of mid-century modern architect Paul Revere Williams. Although there were few Black architects at the time, Williams excelled, co-designing the space-themed hub of LAX and the Beverly-Wilshire hotel as well as houses for Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. “The Architect” shows Williams in a midshot with a white-washed face, an abstract architectural model before him.

Painted around the time he learned of his father’s cancer, the large-scale “Painting for My Dad” seems inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.” It features a desert ridge at night with a lone figure on the brink of a black, star-strewn sky.

“Weighty elements are painted thinly, the black infinite abyss has the substance,” notes Wells Fray-Smith, former senior curator at Barbican in London, whence the show came after opening at Potsdam’s DAS MINSK. Next year, it travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “He said he wanted painting to exist in the land of the spirits, and this work does so perfectly. He got existential about what art was for and wanting to make things that matter, but questioning whether art was a vehicle for him to do then, while he was dealing with his own family and the death of his dad.”

After his father’s passing in 2011, Davis was left with an inheritance and his father’s wish that he use it to “foster community and joy.” The Underground Museum occupied four storefronts in the Arlington Heights section of LA, wedged between a tattoo parlor and a liquor store. Its stated mission: “To ensure that no one has to travel outside the neighborhood to see world-class art, or learn from leading thinkers, educators, chefs, and artists.” 

Davis hustled fruitlessly to get local art institutions to lend to the Underground Museum. So, he decided to do his own show of modern masterpieces, calling it, "Imitation of Wealth", a play on the 1959 Douglas Sirk movie, Imitation of Life, about a black girl who passes for white and her mother who doesn’t. Davis’ show featured fake works by real artists. A friend's bottlerack was a handy Duchamp readymade. Fluorescent tubes covered with purple gel became a Dan Flavin. He bought a $70 vacuum on Craig’s List, put it in a glass case and lit it– Jeff Koons. As the title of the show suggests, at the time, it was worthless art imitating expensive art. 

Showcasing work by people like Lorna Simpson and Roy DeCarava, the museum struck an agreement with MOCA’s Helen Molesworth (a Davis mentor) to show works by William Kentridge. Economically ravaged by COVID, it closed permanently in 2022.

Following the death of his father, Davis turned to his mother, artist/writer/designer Faith Childs-Davis, in a series called “1975”, painted from photos taken by her that year while studying in Chicago. With these large-scale works, he returns to his roots– images of ordinary people doing ordinary things– kids beating the heat at a public pool, a teacher leading a class.

In 2013, Davis was diagnosed with a rare cancer, liposarcoma. With his energy depleted, he embarked on “Seventy Works”, a series of small-scale pieces using collage and watercolor. Some feature friends like fellow artist Mark Bradford, others seem to be studies for larger works, like 2014’s “Pueblo del Rio: Public Art Sculpture”, and one– a picture of a policeman– is a collaboration with Davis’ son, Moses. 

After a round of chemo, the artist summoned enough strength to execute a series of paintings based on Pueblo del Rio, an apartment complex built by Paul Williams and Richard Neutra to house defense-contract workers. However, after factories closed, it became a ghetto. Davis portrays it with ominously bruised skies, populated with figures from the performing arts– ballerinas in “Arabesque”, a marching band trumpeter in “Prelude”, and a band leader in “The Conductor.” “His palette makes it feel displaced or unstuck in time,” notes Fray-Smith. “It’s not quite dawn, it's not midday, it's not dawn or twilight. They are in their own time.”

After using his mother’s photos for his “1975” series, Davis used his brother Kahlil’s photos from a visit to the Congo for a 2014 series, his penultimate body of work before his death, a year later when he moved the family to the LA suburb Ojai. With a rented garage for a studio, he lived in a friend’s house, which was designed by Paul Williams.

“He began to confront his death and passing in painting,” shares Fray-Smith. “His sense of reality becomes loose, figures lose their attachment.” In an untitled work, a slouching man against a pale background seems nearly transparent. His final piece is a self-portrait propped up on an elbow while lying in a grassy field, gloomy palette. 

“I’m aware my paintings might be forgotten. I’m confronted with the question of does what I'm doing even matter anymore?” He asks toward the end of the film. “I wanted to do something with substance. I wanted to make work that matters.”