Permanent Collection

— American painter Noah Davis (1983-2015) created a distinctive body of figurative paintings depicting Black people in everyday scenarios while exploring emotional textures of life. 

Born June 1983 in Seattle, Washington, he started painting in his early teens and had his own studio by age 17. He studied painting at Cooper Union School of Art in New York but left before graduating, moving to Los Angeles in 2004.

In Los Angeles he worked at the MOCA bookstore. He developed a distinctive style employing thin washes and thick layers of paint, influenced by painters Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Mark Rothko, and Fairfield Porter.

In 2012, Davis and his wife, artist Karon Davis, founded the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights, a working-class Black and Latinx neighborhood far from Los Angeles’s mainstream art scenes. They wanted to bring museum-quality art “within walking distance” to a community that had no access to it.

Davis used vintage photographs of Black life as source material, creating scenes of family life, people swimming, resting, enjoying leisure. “If I’m making any statement, it’s to just show Black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it,” he stated. His Imitation of Wealth exhibition opened at the Underground Museum the day of his death.

Davis died August 2015 in Ojai, California at age 32 from a rare cancer. Work held by MoMA, Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Hammer Museum.

Sources: Alta Journal, David Zwirner, Wikipedia

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