Noah Davis - part 1

How long have you been painter, Noah?

My whole life.

What motivated you to be a painter?

I just couldn't do anything else. I'd rather fail at painting than be successful in anything else.

Noah Davis

at the Barbican.





I loved this exhibition. I loved the paintings, found the artist a fascinating human being, raged at all the references to the US and its racism. I also loved writing this post and am glad that I waited for a while after seeing the exhibition.

Even as a high school student, Noah Davis had a painting studio - a space near his family home in Seattle, which his parents rented so he would stop ruining the carpets. He curated his first exhibition in a shopping mall while he was still at high school.  Born in 1983, he briefly studied film and conceptual art at Cooper Union in New York before leaving to pursue his own education among fellow artists in Los Angeles. Throughout his career, he moved between different painting styles to present a breadth of Black Life, feeling keenly his 'responsibility to represent the people around me'.

Davis drew inspiration from every corner of life: photographs he found in flea markets, books on Egyptian mythology, daytime reality TV, revered history paintings, early inernet blogs. He used these sources to populate his work with a cast of mainly anonymous figures: they rest and play and dance and read and swim in evocative scenes that tug between the real and the imaginary, the ordinary and the fantastical.  

In 2012, aged 29, Davis and his wife Karon, also an artist, co-founded the Underground Museum, four storefronts in the historically Black and Latinx neighbourhood of Arlington Heights in Los Angeles, which they transformed into a cultural centre that was free and open  to all. Building a community around art was central to Davis' life and practice. He wanted 'to change the way that people view art, the way people buy art, the way people make art'.

The exhibition traces his beginnings as a young artist in 2007 to his untimely death from cancer in 2015, highlighting his relentless creativity and his devotion to all aspects of a person's encounter with art. As he put it simply: 'Painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It is visceral and immediate'.

40 Acres and as Unicorn, 2007, (acrylic and gouache on canvas)

Many of Davis' early paintings obliquely reference the injustices faced by Black Americans throughout history. This work alludes to the 1865 degree that formerly enslaved families freed during the American Civil War would be given '40 acres and a mule'. Many people expected to own the land on which they had endured forced labour without compensation, but Abraham Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, repealed the order. and neither the land nor the mule ever materialised. Here, a man riding a unicorn emerges from a black background, presenting an imagined scene of quiet power and majesty against the harsh realities of history.

Single Mother with Father out of the Picture, 2007-08, (oil, acrylic and graphite on canvas)

Bad Boy for Life, 2007, (acrylic, gouache and Conte crayon on canvas)

Mary Jane, 2008, (oil and acrylic on canvas)

2004 (1), 2008, (Dutch Boy house paint on linen)

This is the only surviving painting of three Davis made for his exhibition Nobody. It survived because it was bought by one of his friends. Because none of the paintings sold, Davis planned to bring the canvases back to his studio where he could work over them afresh.

The three hard-edged abstract paintings were created in October 2008, one month before Barack Obama was elected president. Taking up abstraction as a tool to address contemporary politics, each of the the works was titled 2004, in reference to the year of the last presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry. The works' deep purple hue blended Republican-red with Democratic-blue and their forms were taken from the outline of three critical swing states - Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico.

1984, 2009, (oil on canvas)

This painting is based on a childhood photograph of Karon, Davis' wife, aged six, wearing a Holy Hobbie costume in anticipation of Halloween. The doll's associations with childhood innocence are made more complex as Davis depicts a young girl in an act of racial masking.

The Year of the Coxswain, 2009, (oil on canvas)

Looking closer. 

Davis quite often blurred the faces of his subjects so as to emphasize the action, the message of the painting.

Isis, 2009, (oil and acrylic on linen)

One of Davis' most distinctive skills was his ability to infuse his paintings with a sense of timelessness. His scenes could simultaneously be set in the past, present and an imagined future. In this painting, he layers chronologies. The image is based on a photograph of his wife Karon standing in their backyard, but the work's title and Karon's bright yellow wings allude to the Egyptian deity Isis, (who was traditional represented by a sun disc, suspended between the horns of a cow).  Isis was often invoked by ordinary people wanting to draw on her healing spells, especiallhy in relation to rites for the dead. Davis uses the familiar setting of a white clapboard home and backyard to suggest a tender moment in which a young Black woman encounters her own magic. He rarely depicts himself in his work, but, here, his reflection can be seen in the home's window.

The Architect, 2009, (oil and wax on canvas)

In an interview David singled out this painting as his favourite: 'A lot of Egyptian texts are about architects, and a lot of the great pharaohs are architects, so that's what it's about'. The painting's central subject is Paul Revere Williams, a celebrated Black architect who built over 3,000 buildings in Los Angeles between the 1920s and 1970s, at a time when architects were almost exclusively white men. Poignantly, Williams told the story of how he had to learn to draw upside down so he could sit across from - rather than next to - his white clients while showing them his vision. 

Here, Williams presides over a model of a pyramid-like structure, which fuses references to ancient Egypt with the crisp, clean lines of modernist design. Davis obscures the architect's face with a splash of white paint to resist the work becoming a portrait of an individual figure, instead celebrating the legacy of Black world-building.

Painting for my dad:

Painting for my dad, 2011, (oil on canvas)

Davis had only just become a father to his son Moses when his own father, Keven was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2011. He spent more time in New York, where Keven lived, so they could be close. Davis rented a small studio in Harlem but found he could paint almost nothing. He decided to focus on the rocky forms he drove past on the way to his studio back in Los Angeles. They are the backdrop for Painting for my Dad, which pictures a lone man staring out into a starry abyss - on the precipice between this world and the next.

Keven Davis died in 2011. He left his son an inheritance to be used to foster community and joy. The following year, Davis and Karon rented four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights. Here, they started devoting themselves to what would become known as the Underground Museum - an art space, free and open to all - made possible by his father's legacy.

Savage Wilds:

In 2012, David created a series of paintings that focused on the constructed and often derogatory portrayal of Black subjects on American daytime television.  They were shown in an exhibition titled Savage Wilds after a controversial play by American satirist Ishmael Reed. The play offered a searing critique of the absurdist racism of the American media, and exposed the connection between spectacle and exploitation.

Davis worked directly from the screen, pausing episode of Maury, Judge Judy or Jerry Springer to capture particularly dramatic moments, such as a presenter revealing the results of a paternity test. He gives particular attention to the elaborate sets, title graphics and positioning of studio audiences as reminders of the levels of manipulation involved in the shows' creation and consumption.

The Maury, 2012, (oil on canvas)

The Missing Link:

Davis wanted to produce an 'alternative canon' of art history that assimilated many of the overlooked artists he admired while allowing him the freedom 'to create my own universe'. By 2012, he had taken on the space that would become the Underground Museum and was busy creating what he felt was missing in the Los Angeles artworld; a place for the 'people around me' to congregate and feel recognised.

The exhibition The Missing Link opened in 2013. Davis continued to combine his interest in seemingly everyday scenes with a sense of  'being displaced in time'. A young boy levitates in a front yard, while a solitary man lounges against a tree in reference to Manet's pastoral scenes and Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry. David sought to poise his work between the real and the otherworldly. As he explained: 'These elements of fantasy may arise from my need to 'break the spell', or the constraints of art theory, and move more into the realm of mysticism'.

The Missing Link 1, 2013, (inkjet print and oil on canvas)

The Missing Link 6, 2013, (oil on canvas)

The Missing Link 3, 2013

Davis was a great admirer of Mark Rothko, who used fine layers of oil paint to create the impression of being immersed in a field of colour. Rothko was frank about his desire to convey the full spectrum of human drama: 'tragedy, ecstasy and doom'.  Driving throuth Los Angeles neighbourhoods, Davis liked to notice what he called 'hood Rothkos', city walls that had been graffitied and then painted over in solid blocks of colour, their hazy edges resembling Rothko's trembling geometries. Here, a lone man carries a briefcase in a setting that seems to be part-Rothko, part-urban landscape. 

To see some of Rothko's work you can go here

The Missing Link 4, 2013, (oil on canvas)

This painting features Lafayette Park, a vast housing project in Downtown Detroit designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1959. Davis described the development as 'an interesting example of urban renewal and the advent of housing projects... I guess you can say I'm fascinated with instances where Black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide'. 

Here, the steel and glass of the apartment block glimmer in the sunshine. In a chequered pattern of blue, green and brown, the building's windows reflect the sky, lawn and children joyfully swimming below. Davis often drew on architecture to explore the intersections of race and class in urban America, as well as the historic failures of American society to suport Black communities. For Lafayette Park to be built, a predominantly Black working class neighbourhood was razed - a common practice that occured as part of federally funded 'urban renewal' programmes rolled out across the US from the 1950s to the 1970s. In this painting, Davis recasts the space as one of community, capturing the residents in a moment of leisure.

The Underground Museum imitation of wealth:

The vision for the Underground Museum was to bring culture to an area where very little of it was on offer. Alongside exhibition spaces, there would be a purple garden in homage to Prince, a wooden bar inspired by Donald Judd's sculpture and furniture, and a lending library with the kinds of books and vinyl records that had made Davis and Karon want to become artists.

When no museums would lend artworks to exhibit at the Underground Museum, Davis decided he would simply do himself: 'What if we just use what we have - like these ugly ass lights?' The building's LED strip lights were turned into an imitation Dan Flavin, while a $70 vacuum cleaner from Craigs list became a knock-off Jeff Koons. The exhibition was an ode to the bootleg, the title riffing off Douglas Sirk's 1959 melodrama film Imitation of Life, in which the young Black progatonist passes as white.

Imitation of Jeff Koons, 2013, (Hoover vacuum, cleaner, fluorescent lights and acrylic)

Imitation of Robert Smithson, 2013, (mirrors and sand)

Imitation of Marcel Duchamp, 2013, (iron bottle rack)

To see some of Duchamp's work go here , here , here , here

Imitation of Dan Flavin, 2013., (fluorescent lights, purple gels and standard light fixtures)

1975:

In 2013, Davis turned to his family's personal archives as source material, painting directly from photographs his mother Faith Childs-Davis took in 1977-78 while a college student in Chicago, Los Angeles and Paris. While one picture captures Davis' father Keven, the other paintings are of unknown figures his mother came across in public swimming pools, classrooms or out in the city streets. Often, his subjects' faces are obscured or blurred - Davis was less interested in individual subjectivities than in depicting a sense of their aliveness outside the scrutiny of white society.

Davis used rabbit-skin glue beneath the oil paint, an adhesive also used by Rothko, that required him to paint quickly and gives the surfaces a vibrant sheen. Some sections of these paintings feel as though images are still emerging, while others dissolve into radiant, semi-translucent abstract washes as Davis sought to 'take these anonymous moments and make them permanent'.