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\n Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/p>\n
\t Noah Davis \t
\n Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/p>\n
A traveling retrospective of essential viewing makes an elegiac landing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.<\/p>\n
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Noah Davis, installation view. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art. Pictured, far left: Forty Acres and a Unicorn, 2007. Second from left: Delusions of Grandeur, 2007.<\/p>\n
Noah Davis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, organized by Eleanor Nairne and Wells Fray-Smith with Camila Rondon, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, through April 26, 2026<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n
Now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Noah Davis gathers more than sixty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by the artist; this is the fourth iteration of a show that was previously held at DAS MINSK in Potsdam, the Barbican in London, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It is essential viewing. Davis, who died in 2015 at the tragically young age of thirty-two, was a painter of Black quotidian life\u2014\u201cnormal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it,\u201d he once said\u2014but that ordinariness always seemed to coexist with the magical, the wondrous, the supernatural. A boy rides not a horse but a unicorn. Another contemplates climbing a staircase that may as well be Mount Everest. A little girl sits primly, hands in lap, on the edge of a bed, face obscured by a ghoulish mask. A young man takes flight among his cavorting peers. A woman, posing in a slightly shabby backyard, evokes an Egyptian goddess. Ballerinas dance in a housing project; a conductor directs an invisible orchestra from the stoop of an empty building.<\/p>\n
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Noah Davis, The Conductor, 2014. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate. \u00a9 Estate of Noah Davis.<\/p>\n
This is work that makes space for a picture of life that is informed by history\u2014always\u2014whether that history is part of the ongoing legacy of anti-Blackness in this country, or the history of art itself. 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007) refers, of course, to broken post-Emancipation promises of reparation, but here disappointment turns to wonder; Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque (2014) to failed social experiments in low-income housing, reimagining such sites not only as those of unrealized dreams but also of creative potential. 1975 (3), 1975 (8), and 1975 (9), all from 2013, are based on photographs taken by Davis\u2019s mother, Faith Childs-Davis, when she was a teenager on Chicago\u2019s South Side. They depict children delightedly splashing in neighborhood pools, but are haunted by the all-too-recent fact of segregation. Delusions of Grandeur (2007), the painting of the boy at the bottom of the stairs, comes straight out of \u00c9douard Vuillard; Isis (2009) echoes Edgar Degas. A series of works from 2013, titled The Missing Link, draws upon sources from the Western art canon (Courbet, Mondrian, Rothko, and so on), applying them to subjects\u2014Black subjects\u2014that such a canon has only rarely acknowledged. And then there are the glimpses of the art of Black makers\u2014Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, Jennifer Packer, among others\u2014whose thinking informed his, and vice versa.<\/p>\n
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Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. Oil and acrylic on linen. Courtesy the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate. \u00a9 Estate of Noah Davis.<\/p>\n
I first saw the show in Los Angeles, installed in the Hammer\u2019s soaring, airy, white-walled galleries, and it filled me with a kind of joy that is hard to describe\u2014my heart pounded, my brain was going a mile a minute. A true Stendhal moment. In Philadelphia, the mood is decidedly different: in low-ceilinged rooms with no natural light, painted black, gray, puce, purple, dark blue, and terra-cotta, the effect is mournful, elegiac. I get it: it\u2019s hard to look at the virtuosity of Davis\u2019s brush and not be gripped by a deep sadness at what we have lost, especially standing in front of the untitled works he made in the month or so before he died of a rare form of cancer. An old man shuffles, hunchbacked, in front of a wall that resembles a Rothko painting; two girls nap on a couch, their bodies forming a fascinating counterpoint of limbs and torsos while their heads settle into crooked elbows; a man sprawls out on the ground like a dying hero, rivulets of diluted oil paint washing down the canvas like tears.<\/p>\n
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Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate. \u00a9 Estate of Noah Davis.<\/p>\n
For me, though, the most grief-producing moment in the show is the installation of works that pay homage to Davis\u2019s role as cofounder, with his wife, Karon, of the Underground Museum in 2012. The brilliantly conceived space in Arlington Heights, which took up four storefronts on a busy thoroughfare, functioned as an exhibition venue, a community center, and a gathering spot. Davis intended to fill it with museum-quality pieces so that the residents of this working-class, largely Black and Latino neighborhood could access such work as easily as their white, middle-class peers did. When he discovered art institutions wouldn\u2019t lend to him, he began making replicas instead\u2014of Dan Flavin\u2019s fluorescent light sculptures, Marcel Duchamp\u2019s bottle rack, Robert Smithson\u2019s mirror-and-sand displacements, Jeff Koons\u2019s glass-encased vacuum cleaner. Davis\u2019s lights were cheap shop lights, though, and his vacuum cleaner was bought used on Craigslist\u2014substitutions that resulted in quietly hilarious and canny \u201cghetto\u201d versions of high culture. He dared his audiences to try to explain the difference between the originals and his imitations, or provoked them to realize that they, too, had the wherewithal to make art.<\/p>\n
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Noah Davis, installation view. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.<\/p>\n
The Underground Museum was a result of Davis\u2019s goal \u201cto change the way people view art, the way people buy art, the way they make art.\u201d It\u2019s all the more heartbreaking, then, that it died, in part, as a consequence of the art world\u2019s modus operandi. When the curator Helen Molesworth arrived at LA\u2019s MOCA in 2014, she made the Underground Museum her project, offering to arrange loans for a series of shows that Davis planned from his deathbed; he lived long enough to see two of them realized, including a screening of William Kentridge\u2019s Journey to the Moon (2003), which is on view here. After Davis\u2019s passing, the market for his work went into overdrive thanks to David Zwirner gallery, which began representing the estate in 2020. At the same time, the Underground Museum, with the help of Molesworth, began a perhaps too-fast drive to formalize itself as a by-the-books institution (by establishing a board, acquiring nonprofit status, securing foundation money, and hiring professional directors). Things began to fall apart; the center could not hold. Zwirner mounted an expansive exhibition in 2020 in New York, curated by Molesworth, that included a room meant to convey the anti-institutional informality of the Underground Museum. That show traveled to Arlington Heights in 2022\u2014and ended up being the last exhibition there before the venture crumbled under the weight of the family\u2019s grief, as Karon Davis said in a statement at the time. One wonders if the weight of paperwork, fundraising, and all the other trappings of the 501(c)(3) life played a role, as well.<\/p>\n
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Noah Davis, installation view. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art. Pictured: Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque, 2014.<\/p>\n
What we are left with, in the wake of this collapse, are elegant shows with a blue-chip vibe, like this traveling retrospective. Unusually, instead of being simply underwritten by the gallery, as is the norm these days, the exhibition\u2019s tour was financed in part by print editions that Zwirner produced of two of the painter\u2019s most iconic images\u2014a strangely extractive move. This inside-baseball detail is a small indication for me of how Davis\u2019s legacy has been transformed into business as usual when it comes to how people view art, buy art, make art. It\u2019s almost too much to bear, especially for a show that is too important to miss.<\/p>\n