LONDON: NOAH DAVIS

Noah Davis

February 6 - May 11, 2025

BARBICAN CENTRE
Silk Street
London

From barbican.org.uk: 

Celebrating the late artist’s expansive creativity, this debut retrospective showcases Noah Davis as one of the most original and uncanny painters emerging in recent years. 

Primarily based in Los Angeles, Noah Davis created a body of figurative paintings that explores a range of Black life.

Motivated by the desire to ‘represent the people around me’, Davis painted figures diving into pools, sleeping, dancing, and looking at art in scenes that can be both realistic and dreamlike, joyful and melancholic. Davis drew from anonymous photography, personal archives, film, art history and his imagination to create a ravishing body of work. Often enigmatic, his paintings reveal a deep feeling for humanity and the emotional textures of the everyday.

In 2012, Davis co-founded The Underground Museum to give free access to world-class art for the people of Arlington Heights, LA. This exhibition presents over 50 of Davis’ works in painting, sculpture, curating and community-building from 2007 to his untimely death in 2015.

For more information, click here. 

CHICAGO: Noah Davis

Image via rebuild-foundation.org.

1975 Paintings

February 20 – May 21, 2016

Organized by Theaster Gates and Ken Stewart

STONY ISLAND ARTS BANK

6760 South Stony Island Avenue

Chicago, IL

From rebuild-foundation.org:

Inspired by snapshots that Noah Davis’ mother, Faith Childs-Davis, took while attending South Shore High School in Chicago and during the years following, the works included in 1975 Paintings capture scenes of the city’s South Side and Faith’s travels to California and abroad.

Born in Seattle, Noah spent several years at Cooper Union before moving to Los Angeles, where he built his reputation as a figurative painter. Working primarily in a muted palette, Noah’s canvases depict black figures in intimate and isolated scenes. Layers of translucent brushstrokes and opaque washes give texture and depth to shallow domestic interiors and surreal landscapes.

Noah was known not only for his painting, but also his curatorial vision. These two connected interests ultimately led to the creation of The Underground Museum in 2012. Founded in collaboration with his wife, artist Karon Davis, The Underground Museum opened as a hub for alternative exhibition practices in the heart of Los Angeles’ Arlington Heights neighborhood. The Museum consists of a series of storefronts turned into a gallery, a screening room, a library, and a garden. The 2013 exhibition Imitation of Wealth, now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, features replicas of works by 20th century art icons like Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons and draws attention to the general unwillingness of art institutions to bring valuable original artwork to working-class and poor neighborhoods. A year after The Underground Museum opened, Noah told Art in America: “I like the idea of bringing a high-end gallery into a place that has no cultural outlets within walking distance.”

1975 Paintings is occasioned in part by the strong affinity between The Underground Museum and Rebuild Foundation. The exhibition reunites the 11 paintings in the community that gave rise to them. As Noah’s mother, Faith, explains, “The one photography class that I took in my senior year at South Shore High School is probably the one class that saved my life. While my peers were dodging drug dealers and stray bullets, I was the lucky and proud owner of a 35mm … through the lens of that Canon, I discovered my future self and captured my own personal journey from the South Side of Chicago.”

Faith’s photographs capture close-cropped scenes of the city and her journey to California: snapshots of afternoons spent at neighborhood pools, shopping trips, cab rides, college classrooms, and date nights with her future husband, Keven Davis. Nearly forty years later, Noah’s brother, artist Kahlil Joseph, discovered several undeveloped film canisters in his late father’s Harlem apartment. Kahlil and Noah developed the film and shared some of them on their collaborative website, FebMag. In 2013, Noah created the series of works that comprise 1975 Paintings, taking his mother’s photographs as reference and inspiration.

Exhibit Link

Newly Launched Chicago Art Space to Show Works by Late Noah Davis

TRANSITION: Noah Davis (1983-2015)

Noah Davis. Image via toymachine.com.

Los Angeles painter and founder of Underground Museum dies at 32

Text | Alex Greenberger (with additional reporting by Sarah Douglas) for ARTnews.com

Published | August 30, 2015

Noah Davis, the Los Angeles–based painter of surreal, post-racial images and the founder of the nonprofit space the Underground Museum, has died at 32. Davis’s cause of death has not been announced, but he was sick with a rare cancer, according to a Los Angeles Times article published earlier this summer.

Davis is best known for his paintings of African Americans that have a dreamy, unreal quality to them, despite their muted color palettes and touches of realist detail. Although some of the figures that Davis painted were black, he didn’t consider his works political. “If I’m making any statement,”he told Dazed in 2010, “it’s to just show black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it.” Davis instead chose to describe his works as “instances where black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide.”

In 2012, for a show at the James Harris Gallery, in Seattle, Davis did a series of paintings about reality television, titled “Savage Wilds.” (Davis, who had also shown with Roberts & Tilton, was represented at the time he died by the Los Angeles gallery Papillion.) The works, like many others by Davis, play on the division, or lack thereof, between life and art, and between true personalities and performed ones. In one work, Jerry Springer is shown cautiously picking up a torn-off weave. Because Davis distorts Springer’s face, it becomes hard to tell whether the act is genuine or just for show. In other works in the series, television logos are painted onto the bottom to make clear that what we are seeing are stills.

Davis’s inspirations ranged from Leon Golub to Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Trouble with Harry. Many of Davis’s diverse references can be traced to his time working at MOCA LA’s bookstore after he left New York City. (“I left school because it wasn’t teaching me anything,” Davis said of his time at Cooper Union, where he studied between 2001 and 2004.) His time working at the museum brought him into art history of all kinds, though it was not as if he didn’t have art-world connections of his own—Davis was also friends with Dash Snow and Ed Templeton, who encouraged him to continue painting.

Davis also later founded the Underground Museum in 2012. The nonprofit space, in Los Angeles’s Arlington Heights, is in a space that used to be several storefronts, a pupusería, and a church. Davis ran the space, which became a notable cultural center in Los Angeles, with his brother the video artist Kahlil Joseph, who has worked with Kendrick Lamar and others. They knocked down all three of the original buildings and built a new one that allowed for shows and film screenings, and had a garden and a library.

Davis had several shows there and had plans to curate several more over the coming three years. In 2013, Davis created Imitation of Wealth, an installation in which Davis redid work by blue-chip artists, usually with low-cost materials. A sculpture from Jeff Koons’s “The New” series, for example, was remade using a $70 Hoover vacuum that Davis found on Craigslist. The installation has been restaged and is currently showing at storefront:, a space across the street from MOCA.

The Underground Museum was most recently the subject of the inaugural show at the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s University Gallery (BHQFUG), in New York. That exhibition looked at the way that the Underground Museum could be considered a work unto itself—how Davis’s space was just as much a way of mediating between life and art as any of his paintings, sculptures, or installations. “You’ll be hearing a lot about $400 million museums next week thanks to the opening of the new Whitney,” Christian Viveros-Fauné wrote in the Village Voice when the BHQFUG show opened. “But you won’t see anything nearly as surprising or as radical as Noah Davis and his Underground Museum.”

Davis’s late father was the lawyer Keven Davis, who worked with tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, helping to arrange a $40 million, five year contract with Reebok for Venus in 2000; he died of a brain tumor in 2012.

“I knew him and I know his brother,” Aleim Johnson, the Los Angeles-based publisher of Aleim magazine, told ARTnews of Noah Davis. “He was at dinner parties with me. He was so smart and had such a great sense of humor. He came to visit me recently with his wife. He was sick, but still we spent hours laughing. He was one of the most important young painters of his time.”

“When Noah spoke,” Johnson recalled, “he would often speak with imagery. He would describe something with specificity and detail and you could visualize what he was saying as if it were on a canvas. His words flowed as if he were painting.”

“I own a drawing he did of Venus Williams,” Johnson continued. “It’s in my living room in Los Angeles. It’s my favorite piece.”

Source Link

Noah Davis dies at 32; L. A. painter and installation artist

Artist Noah Davis dies at 32

Artist and Curator Noah Davis Dies at Age 32 of Rare Cancer

NEW YORK: Noah Davis

Noah Davis, 56. Image via bhqfu.org.

Noah Davis and The Underground Museum

April 4 - April 26, 2015

Gallery open Saturdays 12-6pm, and by appointment - info@bhqfu.org

FUG

431 E 6th St. (between 1st Ave & Ave A)

Basement

New York, NY

From bhqfu.org:

Noah Davis’ new paintings and collages are, in his words, “instances where black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide.” This exhibition will also feature selections from the Underground Museum's collection featuring affiliated artists and collectors including  Karon Davis, Dan Eldon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Hank Peltzer, Henry Taylor, Kandis Williams and Suné Woods.

Noah Davis (born 1983, Seattle, WA) studied painting at Cooper Union in New York City and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He founded The Underground Museum in 2012 and operates the ongoing not for profit project. The Underground Museum is a revolutionary platform for the arts and community in the West Adams / Crenshaw district of central Los Angeles. It offers a new public entity for exhibitions and programming as no inner-city institution has done before. Through exhibitions, film screenings, a public garden and library, The Underground Museum upholds the belief that art is an essential part of a vibrant, just, and healthy society. This month, The Underground Museum was honored with LAXART’s 10 Year Anniversary Artist Grant for its contribution to the community.

BHQFU is pleased to announce an expansion of its campus to include a new project space, FUG, at 431 E 6th St. FUG will host BHQFU’s Visiting Artist Residency Program supporting artists and collaborative projects from around the globe through three to six week residencies merging exhibitions, public programs, classes, and workshops. Visiting Artist Residency Program proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis via bhqfu.org.

Exhibit Link

NEW YORK: Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy, still from Art Jobs and Lullabies (Covered and Remixed), Video Suite 2, 2015, Video, 37 minutes, Edition of 5 + 1 AP. Image via garisandhahn.com.

Art.Jobs.Lullabies

April 2 – May 2, 2015

GARIS & HAHN

263 Bowery

New York, NY

From Garis & Hahn press release:

Garis & Hahn is pleased to present Art.Jobs.Lullabies, a presentation of new and recent music, video and mixed media works by Kalup Linzy. This event marks the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the artist.

New York based performance artist Kalup Linzy writes, directs, produces, and stars in several complexly interwoven soap opera serials that make up the artist’s best known video series’, including As da Art World Might Turn and Melody Set Me Free. A dedicated performer with a background in choir and theater, Linzy has meticulously developed a cast of 22 characters he portrays since beginning the series in 2002. Riffing on a screenwriter’s tactic to ‘test’ roles in different scenarios, Linzy runs many of his characters through real world scenes, appearing as them for important performances, including his 2010 cameo on the veteran soap opera, General Hospital. His tragic, talented and naive alter egos are often confronted with the harsh reality of the channels that control their art world success. Paradoxically, Linzy also plays the role of opportunistic and powerful vixens, who use and take what they want to get to the top. In drawing on semi­autobiographical material filtered through the gaudy, melodramatic treatment of a daytime soap, Linzy is able to simultaneously live out his fantasies and aesthetic pursuits, while also satirizing the art world establishment and realities he faces in his own practice and personal life.

For Linzy’s new and most recent works featured in Art.Jobs.Lullabies, new music videos and remixes add to the mythology of several of his characters, many of whom have achieved their own fame and fandom, such as performance artist, “Pisces” and video artist/singer, “Kaye.” The photo collage and gouache on paper pieces directly represent these parts as well. Jimmy and Lisa (A Selfie) (2015), a collage featuring the eponymous roles (and Kaye’s fictional parents), is made by Linzy playing the artist, “Katonya” of As da Art World Might Turn–and signed by both Linzy and Katonya. Photographs also reaffirm several character identities, such as “Taiwan,” a torch singer presumed dead, and Kalup Linzy, himself, for Sweet Liberty (2015), produced in collaboration with Dan Colen. The image, of nude Linzy and Colen on the verge of kissing, is both provocative (it was banned from a planned exhibition on London street billboards) as it is vacant, an artist intended vacuum for viewer’s projections. Linzy is further revealed in the videos in his Art Job Lullabies, Video Suite 1 & 2 (2015) series, and débuting for the exhibition. Comprised of original, covered, and remixed songs performed by Linzy, including Curtis Mayfield's We People Who Are Darker Than Blue (2015), as well as DJ collaborations based on sampling of classic R&B tunes, both video suites offer the most current look at the evolution of Linzy’s practice.

This duality of personas and the ‘real’ Kalup Linzy, presented together in Art.Jobs.Lullabies, hints at the overarching theme for Linzy’s overall body of work–that is, how much role playing is inherent in self-actualization. As Linzy has stated, “I’m still learning where I fit in with all these personas...Sometimes these roles are embarrassing, but...the more embarrassed I feel, the better it is for the audience, a relative once said to me. That creates a space of real freedom.”

About the Artist

Kalup Linzy was born 1977 in Florida. He received his MFA from University of South Florida in 2003, also attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Prospect1, New Orleans, LA; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; and in solo exhibitions at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA and MoMA P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, NY; among others. Works by Kalup Linzy are held in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Linzy has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Harvard University and New York University. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

About Garis & Hahn

Garis & Hahn is a gallery­cum­Kunsthalle that mounts exhibitions focused on conceptual narratives and relevant conversations in contemporary art. By displaying an array of carefully curated artists, the gallery endeavors to provide accessibility, education, awareness, and a market to the art while engaging both the arts community and a broader general audience.

Exhibit Link

Watch A Sneak-Peek Video From Kalup Linzy’s New Show

LOS ANGELES: Noah Davis

Image of Noah Davis painting courtesy of Papillion Institute of Art. All rights reserved.

Garden City

May 17 – July 6, 2014

PAPILLION INSTITUTE OF ART

4336 Degnan Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA

From Papillion press release:

Papillion’s new exhibit Garden City features new works by Noah Davis. Garden City is based on the Pueblo del Rio community in Los Angeles, built by Richard Neutra, Paul R. Williams and others in 1941. Davis explains, “the paintings represent the potential of art and performance in a low income community.” The Los Angeles based painter is known for his large-scale figurative canvases. This exhibit marks his Leimert Park debut.

Exhibit Link

CULVER CITY: Noah Davis

The Missing Link

February 23, 2013 – March 30, 2013

ROBERTS & TILTON

5801 Washington Boulevard

Culver City, CA

View Facebook photos of Noah Davis installing The Missing Link here.  

Installing Noah Davis The Missing Link. Image via Robert & Tilton Facebook page.

NEW YORK: Bigger Than Shadows

Rico Gatson, Untitled (Nat Turner), 2011. Image via Dodge-Gallery.com.

Curated by Rich Blint and Ian Cofre

November 10 - December 22, 2012

Opening Reception: November 10, 2012, 6-8pm

DODGEgallery

15 Rivington Street

New York,  NY

Bigger Than Shadows is a group exhibition that explores recent work on the black male body that refashions, riffs on, or re-inflects dominant constructions about the figure known as the black male. Black maleness conjures a host of contradictory associations in the American imagination—from questions about historical morality, creative virtuosity, inherent pathology, to notions of outsized masculinity and, paradoxically, the very absence of masculine authority. Bigger Than Shadows aims to clear space for a timely exchange among emerging and established artists about contemporary and future-oriented visual re-presentations of racialized corporeality—of the black male body in the flesh. Participating artists include Derrick Adams, Noah Davis, Rico Gatson, Adler Guerrier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Duron Jackson, Jayson Keeling, Yashua Klos, Deana Lawson, Kambui Olujimi, Ebony G. Patterson, Robert Pruitt, Jacolby Satterwhite and Zachary Fabri.

Duron Jackson will present a new sculpture titled Bones Crusade, 2012, which expands on his previous work on incarceration, surveillance, and the influence and distortionary effects of these systems. Other sculptural works by Rico Gatson and Adler Guerrier draw from multiple references, engaging the urban landscape and its impression on the body through abstractions of language and perception.

The revelatory photographic contributions from Lyle Ashton Harris, Jayson Keeling, and Deana Lawson are documents of subjects that defy immediate categorization. Harris's and Lawson's examinations of Southern subcultures join Keeling, who is working with a bust of his own face cast by John Ahearn, rephotographing the sculpture to draw attention to subtleties of form through distance.

Yashua Klos's constructions are both fragile and monumental, negotiating aspects of identity through fragmentation, collage, and camouflage. Similarly reconstructed, an array of visual styles will be on display including a contribution from The Human Structure Series (2011) by Derrick Adams, an example of Ebony Patterson's Species Series (2011), a new, large-scale drawing by Houston-based artist Robert Pruitt, a quiet and ambiguous figurative painting by Los Angeles-based Noah Davis, new work by Kambui Olujimi, and a virtual, Hieronymus Bosch-esque video tableau titled Country Ball, 1989-2012, by Jacolby Satterwhite that is built from memory rather than morality.

Rich Blint earned his Ph.D. in the Program in American Studies at New York University. His areas of specialty include African-American literature and culture; the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean; as well as racial visuality, media studies, and U.S. popular culture. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (forthcoming Winter 2013); guest editor of the Winter/Spring 2008 issue of Black Renaissance Noir, a journal of pan-African culture and politics; and has written critically about the work of Wangechi Mutu and Deana Lawson. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the C.L.R. James Institute, Rich has taught courses and guest lectured at New York University, Columbia University School of Law, Vassar College, and the Brecht Forum. He serves on the Executive Board of Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora and is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

Ian Cofre, a graduate of Columbia University, is an independent curator working primarily with emerging artists. Frequently collaborating with Omar Lopez-Chahoud, recent projects include co-writing "The Art Fair Effect," an essay for the Bronx Museum's Taking AIM!The Business of Being an Artist Today (2011) and co-curating the exhibitions Tracing the Unseen Border (2011) at La MaMa La Galleria and Southern Exposure (2009) at Dumbo Arts Center. Other shows include Behind Closed Doors (2011), a curated solo project by Manuela Viera-Gallo at Y Gallery and The Doubtful Guest (2010) at Kill Devil Hill in Greenpoint, NY. He most recently served as Director of the now-closed Sue Scott Gallery and Studio Manager for Mickalene Thomas before that.

Exhibit Link