Noah Davis was trained as a painter, but circumstances turned him into a cultural entrepreneur as the founder of the Underground Museum in a Los Angeles neighbourhood outside the city’s art orbit.
Davis was born in 1983 in Seattle, the son of a lawyer. He began, but did not finish, a degree in painting at the Cooper Union school of art, New York. He died at his home in Ojai, California, on 30 August, aged 32.
Davis will be remembered for many achievements in his short life, especially for the creation of a museum in a series of storefronts that he transformed into a gallery, studio and gardens. The museum’s name alluded to the Underground Railroad, the secret network of shelters and guides that helped black slaves escape to freedom in the north and Canada in the years before the American Civil War.
Working-class surroundings
The small institution was located in a nondescript area, home to African American and Latino families. It was soon under scrutiny for its experiments, even though art collectors and dealers from the wealthy districts of Los Angeles would have needed a guide to find it, and lenders wary of its working-class surroundings were reluctant at first to send works there.
The Underground Museum also provided the young black artist/curator/impresario with a vantage point from which to comment on other art and artists. His 2015 exhibition Imitation of Wealth is a play on the title of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Life, a melodrama about a young black woman passing for white. The show featured a vacuum cleaner similar to a Jeff Koons readymade. While a Koons Hoover has sold for more than $10m, Davis bought his for $70 on the classified ads website Craigslist. On the cheap, Davis also re-created works by Dan Flavin, On Kawaa and Marcel Duchamp. Part of the “storefront” project, the exhibition runs until 29 February 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in partnership with the Underground Museum.
Davis was accepted relatively early into the circuit of museums and galleries. Part of that recognition came from 30 Americans, a touring exhibition of the work of African American artists, launched in 2008 and organised by the Rubell Family Collection. Davis was the youngest artist in the show, in company that includes David Hammons and Kara Walker. It is still touring and opens at the Detroit Institute of the Arts this month (18 October-18 January 2016).
Headless figure of a woman
Davis’s paintings, with their muted colours and hypnotic tones, have a distant, detached quality, suggesting that African Americans occupy another realm altogether from mainstream society. In his monochrome picture The Missing Link 2 (2013), part of a series shown at the Roberts & Tilton gallery in Culver City, California, in 2013, the headless figure of a woman entertainer (Lena Horne? Diana Ross?) is in a spotlit circle against a vast black background. In The Missing Link 3 (2013), an African American man holding a suitcase walks on a black pavement amid purplish planes of faceless structures. The Missing Link 4 (2013) shows black bathers in a swimming pool against a massive building grid of small rectangles, which may refer to the work of Mark Bradford, another black Los Angeles artist. The suggestion is that these bathers share their separate world with Bradford and his art, and by implication, with artists such as Davis.
Jerry (2012) is Davis’s painting of a scene from The Jerry Springer Show. It is not clear whether the image was observed or imagined. Two black women are in the frame. One is on the ground; a large security guard holds the other back. Once again, blacks are performers in a larger business enterprise. It is unclear whether that performance is staged or real.
In You Are …, another 2012 painting, a black man is bent over in a chair on a television sound stage. Two black women seem poised to hit him, as a security guard looks on. Once again, black performance is on view. A fourth figure is shown with her face partially obscured or disfigured—in his portraits, Davis often rubs out or smears the faces of his subjects, in what look like homages to Francis Bacon or Leon Golub.
In a comment that has been frequently cited since Davis’s death, the artist talked of being a black man surrounded by whites. “For a while, I thought I was being put in a box,” he said. “But it’s the most glamorous box I’ve ever been in.”
• Noah Davis, artist and curator, 1983-2015