Noah Davis - part 2

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 -  part 2

 at the Barbican.

 

As usual, I am including the introduction to this second part on this exhibition. If you want to see part 1 go  here  If you have read the introduction and don't want to do so again, scroll down to Seventy Works.

I loved this exhibition. I loved the paintings, found the artist a fascinating human being, raged at 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 keely 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 internet 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'.

Seventy Works:

On 23 December 2013, two years to the day after his father died, Davis was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. While undertaking six months of chemotherapy, he was determined to keep working, and made this series of works on paper from hospital beds and kitchen tables. He used archival paper given to him by his mother and ripped it into 70 pieces, deciding that the series wouold be finished when the paper ran out.

Pueblo del Rio:

In the summer of 2014, Davis had completed his first round of chemotherapy and, with his improved energy levels, continued to expand the Underground Museum. In his notebooks from this time, he refined the museum's mission statement. He dreamt of bringing 'world-class art to a community that does not have access to such resources', noting 'I want to make this building nice... there is a need to feel properly protected'. He registed the museum as a charity, established a board, and began strategising for the future.

That same year, he imagined in paint how culture in 'inner-city neighbourhoods' might look. He turned to Pueblo del Rio, a housing project designed in part by Paul Revere Williams for Black defence workers in 1941. He project was built along the concept of a 'garden city', with shared lawns and outdoor spaces designed to promote community. But Pueblo del Rio quickly degenerated into one of the most impoverished and dangerous areas in the city. In quiet resistance to this reality, Davis reimagined Pueblo del Rio as a place of harmony and accord; whether arabesque ballet dancers, a musician playing a horn, or a young woman and her child crossing the street hand in hand.

Stain Glass Pants, 2014, (oil on canvas)

Public Art Sculpture, 2014, (oil on canvas)

Prelude, 2014, (oil on canvas)

looking closer

Arabesque, 2014, (oil on canvas)

Vernon, 2014, (oil on canvas)

The Conductor, 2014, (oil on canvas)

Congo:

Davis painted his Congo series at the same time as Pueblo del Rio. In these works, he reinterprets pre-existing photographs that his brother Kahlil Joseph had taken on a trip to Central Africa. This is the first time that Davis painted people and contemporary scenes explicitly from Africa rather than the US or his imagination.

Congo, 2015, (oil on canvas)

Congo 2, 2015, (oil on canvas)

Congo 7, 2014, (oil on canvas)


Elegy:

By the summer of 2015, the cancer was taking hold of Davis' body, yet he did not stop painting. He painted the three pictures below in July, just over a month before he died on 29 August 2015. 

Finally we watched a video of Davis at work and here, I include three shots: