Walk through Noah Davis’s scenes of timeless, raw sentiment at the Barbican
Noah Davis, 1975 (8) 2013 (c) The Estate of Noah Davis Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner
text by Maisie McDermid
Paintings make space for imagination in a way photographs almost can, but cannot. This distinction lives between a photograph Noah Davis’s mother, Faith Childs-Davis, took in 1975 of a boy jumping into a crowded pool and a nearly identical painting Davis created in 2013 of the same scene. As both a photographer and a painter, Davis’s eye wandered between the two manifestations of a story.
Up close, one sees how the people Davis’s mother captured on camera appear above and below the water; while, in Davis’ painting, cyan blue water covers the underwater legs and fluttering arms. One captures truth, and the other captures what can be.
Noah Davis at work, Los Angeles, 2009, Patrick O'Brien-Smith
Davis (1983 - 2015) began painting in high school from his hometown of Seattle, Washington. While later studying film and conceptual art at Cooper Union in New York (2001 - 2004), Davis began also exploring the unique position of a camera in front of a scene. In 2004, he moved to LA to pursue his own artistic education and began working at the bookshop Art Catalogues. He referenced artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Mark Rothko, Romare Bearden, and Kerry James Marshall as he developed his own sharp talent for merging history with fiction.
In 2012, he and his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis, co-founded the Underground Museum, a heart-center for the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights in Los Angeles. Although the museum — slash studio, slash residency site, slash exhibition space — is temporarily closed, its legacy continues to illuminate Davis’s commitment to his people and the responsibility he felt to capture their beauty. Davis had curated 18 exhibitions by the time of his untimely death in 2015.
The Barbican’s Noah Davis retrospective — which includes 1975 (8), the photographed and painted boy jumping into water — encourages a close reading. Through its chronological showcasing of over fifty of Davis’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, the exhibition communicates Davis’s evolving interests in politics and current affairs, everyday life, ancient Egypt, family history, the racism of the American media, art history, and architecture. His characters, some fiction and some not, tell stories of normal days in communities, but in this normalcy, Davis discovers magic.
“Noah Davis believed in the power of art to uplift others, and if you spend time with the often surreal and fantastical aspects of his paintings, you will see that he also believed that life — against hardship and violent histories of racism — could also be otherwise,” curator Wells Fray-Smith said. While his paintings of Black communities dancing, resting, swimming, and playing, certainly capture what is; they also capture what can be.
Opportunities to see Davis’s work have remained rare up until now. The first and only exhibition of Davis’s work in London was in 2021, and there has never been an institutional solo show that showcases the breadth of his work. Today, his work feels all the more timely. “We are living in a world of dehumanization, crisis and upheaval in which there is a drought of love and connection. This exhibition, full of love, hope and humanity, felt like it needed to be now,” Fray-Smith said. As the Barbican emerged from a post-war context with a belief similar to Davis’s — that culture can powerfully transform life — the institution hopes to bring people together through Davis’s art and create challenging and delightful spaces for debate and reflection.
“Davis’s approach to making exhibitions was often both deeply serious and hilariously funny, choosing combinations of artists and themes that contained lightness but asked profound questions,” Fray-Smith said. The exhibition features loans from public and private international collections, while also extending the retrospective visit to a multidisciplinary program of related events like figure and portrait drawing workshops and a speaker series from Claudia Rankine, Jason Moran, and more. Some notable pieces from the showing include: 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007, a painting that references the unrealized order that formerly enslaved families freed during the American Civil War would be given ‘40 acres and a mule,’ and Seventy Works, 2014, a selection of painted collages, which combine images of friends, anonymous figures cut out from magazines, newspaper clippings, and modernist sculptures.
“In Painting for My Dad, as we see a man on the precipice between this world and the next, we also notice that the rocks on which he stands are painted thinly. We can see instances of the canvas underneath washes of veiled paint. It’s the black, starry abyss beyond that has substance, texture, opacity, as if to say that this infinite beyond is the real thing,” Fray-Smith said.
Noah Davis’s retrospective is a large-scale showing of the many convergences of fiction and reality people experience daily — where the truth lies somewhere in between.
Noah Davis will be on display at the Barbican until May 11, 2025. Tickets are available on the Barbican website.