The Hammer Museum Honors Iconic L.A. Artist Noah Davis With a New Show

Noah Davis’s lifestyles can have been lower tragically quick—he died in 2015 on the age of 32 from a unprecedented form of most cancers—however the painter’s affect on each his followed house of Los Angeles and the better artwork global was once profound. Now, the Hammer Museum at UCLA is presenting the primary U.S. institutional survey of the artist, Noah Davis, following its debut at Das Minsk in Potsdam and the Barbican Centre in London. Featuring over 50 items—together with portray, sculpture, and works on paper—the display charts Davis’s inventive evolution all the way through his prolific occupation and his affect on his network.

“Davis was something of a hero in the Los Angeles art scene,” co-curator Eleanor Nairne tells W, “But this is the first time that he has had a major museum exhibition, so it’s an opportunity to assess the full arc of his all-too-brief career.” Eleanor Nairne—the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs curator for contemporary and recent artwork, head of division on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and previous Barbican curator—co-curated the exhibition with fellow Barbican curator Wells Fray-Smith.

Although Davis was once born in Seattle, as Nairne notes, Los Angeles was once his selected house, “and the story of his relationship with the city is laced throughout the exhibition.”

That dating integrated the Underground Museum, which he and his spouse, sculptor Karon Davis, cofounded in 2012, within the traditionally Black and Latinx neighborhoods of Arlington Heights (Davis additionally labored intently at the Hammer Museum survey). The loose, community-forward area was once made up of 4 storefronts and was once used as a studio, residency web site, area to turn exhibitions, and a spot to collect with like-minded artists.

It was once all part of Davis’s lifelong challenge to make artwork extra out there to everybody. Although the Underground Museum has since closed to present Davis’s circle of relatives time and area to procedure his dying, his reputation has handiest grown (in 2021, David Zwirner Gallery offered a Davis portray for $1.4 million at Art Basel Miami Beach).

“We hope visitors will come away with a sense of Davis’s breathtaking capacities as an artist—not just as a painter but as a thinker and builder of communities,” Nairne mentioned. The new exhibition options many artwork within the taste for which he’s absolute best identified, showcasing scenes of on a regular basis Black lifestyles with a reflective, hopeful, and imaginative contact.

“There are so many incredible works that visitors will have a rare chance to see,” Nairne says. “Some highlights include an early painting such as 40 Acres and a Unicorn, with its elusive figure riding a unicorn against a rich, Rothko-esque backdrop. There are also the Pueblo del Rio paintings, in which he reimagines an alternative, lyrical future for this public housing project.”

The display, which is arranged chronologically, additionally contains Davis’s extra experimental works in sculpture and paper. Noah Davis shall be on view on the Hammer Museum via August 31; it is going to then commute to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2026.

One last item, Nairne provides: “Don’t miss a chance to see his cat, Pesto, amid the montage of reference photos.”