The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Noah Davis

Painting was all Noah Davis wanted to do, and he began early, encouraged by his father, a lawyer, and his mother, a teacher. When their son was in high school, they rented him a studio near the family home in Seattle, Washington. Seemingly, nothing and no one was beyond the young man’s observation, including strangers in old photographs, with whom he formed a kinship, who then became archetypes on his canvases.

The long reach of history shows in Davis’s 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), an acerbic nod to the unfulfilled “40 acres and a mule” promise made to the formerly enslaved. His Savage Wilds (2012) series reveals the narrow, pejorative images presented of Black people on daytime TV by replicating the onscreen look and melodramatic, often violent conflict of talk shows purporting to feature “real” people.

Surreal, or just a new perspective?

Davis’s spare style blends representation with surrealism. The Year of the Coxswain (2009) depicts five Black rowers just off the water, scull hoisted on their shoulders, treading along the bank of an implied river against a backdrop of dark clouds. Their coxswain stands by, gripping his bugle. Fringes of dripping paint interrupt the field, as though the canvas itself has just been pulled from the current. Mid-career, when Davis began diluting his oils, runny tracks and open spaces began to appear on his canvases, giving the impression that the artist had been hurriedly summoned from the easel.

The rowers are defined, lean in gold uniforms, with long, dark arms and legs. But their faces are generic blurs. They could be any sculling team, except for their color. “Young Black scullers?” Davis seems to ask. “Why is this surprising?

Architectural politics

Several works relating to the built environment are subtle commentaries on race and class. The Architect (2009) was inspired by Paul Revere Williams, a California-based Black architect who built homes from the 1920s to the 1970s for clients who included Hollywood luminaries. Davis was touched to learn that the architect had taught himself to draw upside down so he could sketch while sitting across from, rather than next to, clients. The painting anonymizes Williams with a slash of white across the face, transforming him into a representative for all Black professionals who made humbling concessions to succeed.

The Pueblo del Rio (2014) series celebrates Williams’s 1941 Los Angeles housing project for Black defense workers. Gallery text explains that Pueblo del Rio (intended as a “garden city”) aged badly, becoming deteriorated and dangerous. Davis reimagines the enclave as a cradle of Black culture, where young ballerinas perform on the green (Arabesque), and a horn player serenades the night (Prelude).

In The Missing Link 4 (2013), Davis depicts Detroit’s Lafayette Park, a mid-20th-century urban renewal project designed by Mies van der Rohe. To build it, a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood was razed. The painting observes a sleek new high-rise, a neat grid of blue, tan, and gray rising over a soft-focus foreground in which the ghost of a pool, filled with Black swimmers, dissolves.

Photos and family

Davis was deeply influenced by photographs. They could be casual pictures taken by his mother as a college student, family snapshots, or archival collections he came across. A photograph of his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, inspired Isis (2009), in which Davis transformed her into a goddess.

The couple, fascinated by Egyptian mythology, imagined themselves as Osiris, god of the afterlife, and Isis, goddess of fertility and magic. In Isis, Davis extrapolates from a snapshot of an adolescent Karon in her backyard, painting her wrapped in a golden disc, similar to Isis’s symbolic sun, indicating a young woman discovering her power.

Innovation through grief

Davis’s last years were propelled by tragedy and joy. His father Keven was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the birth of Davis’s son Moses, which prompted the elegiac Painting for My Dad (2011). The work is large, focusing on a man standing at the nexus of two mountains, his back to the viewer, surveying a starry night sky.

Keven left his son a bequest with the instruction to “foster community and joy.” So Davis and Karon rented a triple storefront in Los Angeles’s Arlington Heights, a Black and Latino neighborhood, and in 2012 founded The Underground Museum. Its goal was to bring art into a place where it was missing, for people lacking access, to establish a creative gathering spot for the community.

When collections proved reluctant to lend work to a startup museum in an unconventional area, the Davises were undaunted. To complement an exhibit of Karon’s sculpture, they devised Imitation of Wealth, a curation of faux works in the style of well-known contemporary artists. Objects included a vitrine-encased, vintage Hoover upright vacuum purchased online, a nod to Jeff Koons, and an arrangement of LED bulbs, in homage to minimalist Dan Flavin. These are on view in an installation approximating The Underground Museum.

“An anti-death machine”

Exactly a year after his father’s death, Davis was himself diagnosed with cancer. He continued to paint, exhibit, and curate. In seeking work for exhibition at The Underground Museum, he approached Helen Molesworth, who became an ally. Molesworth, then chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, enabled Davis to assemble 18 exhibitions even as his health declined. He would only live to see one of them mounted at The Underground Museum, which continued to operate until 2022. Davis’s museum, along with posthumous mainstream exhibitions of his work, increased awareness of how much had been lost.

Words spoken last September by curator Helen Molesworth about her career in a speech at Bryn Mawr College are a fitting epitaph for the art and life of Noah Davis: “For a museum is many things, but first and foremost, it is an anti-death machine. Walk through the halls of the museum and everywhere the dead are whispering, clamoring to remain in the living.”

At top: Noah Davis’s 2007 40 Acres and a Unicorn, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)