Remembering Noah Davis: A Visionary Painter’s Enduring Legacy

Noah Davis was an artist who mastered the art of subtle transformation, creating expansive paintings that captured ordinary human moments with a dreamlike, semi-surreal quality. His use of muted tones and soft contrasts invited viewers into a familiar yet slightly altered reality, blending everyday scenes with an elusive sense of otherworldliness.

A graduate of Cooper Union in New York who later worked in California, Davis was widely recognized as the co-founder, alongside his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, of the Underground Museum. Located in Arlington Heights, a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, the museum sought to make high-quality contemporary art—particularly by Black artists—accessible to communities that rarely encountered it. The museum operated until 2022.

Following his untimely death from cancer at age 32 in 2015, interest in Davis’s work has risen dramatically. Exhibitions of his paintings initially took place at the museum he helped establish, and in 2020, a major solo exhibition was held at David Zwirner’s New York gallery, which now represents his estate.

This year, Davis’s legacy is being honored with a comprehensive museum tour featuring 60 works. Beginning at the Barbican Art Gallery in London and later at Das Minsk in Potsdam, Germany, the exhibition has now arrived at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum. Accompanied by an extensive multi-author catalog and displays of personal artifacts, this inaugural museum retrospective explores the depth and sophistication of Davis’s canvases, while also provoking discussion about how to integrate a millennial artist—whose work grapples with the era’s complexities around race and identity—into the broader narrative of American art history.

The retrospective opens with intimate, folksy portrayals of one or two figures in domestic or textured settings, painted around 2007 during Davis’s debut gallery show in New York. One standout work, “Single Mother With Father Out of the Picture,” features a woman seated comfortably in an armchair, with a shirtless child positioned between her legs. The child is rendered through layered applications and removals of paint, creating a luminous, three-dimensional effect with distinct details such as eyes, nose, mouth, and nipple emerging from the textured oil surface.