Noah Davis’s Black American Arcadia

LONDON — In his brief life, Noah Davis both built and revealed worlds, relishing the freedom that comes with “painting to create your own universe,” as he once said. Emphasis on your own. Davis, who succumbed to a rare cancer at the age of 32, was vocal about eschewing stereotypical depictions of Black American life, preferring instead to portray scenes in which Black people could truly recognize themselves. 

An incredibly moving retrospective at the Barbican Centre — the Los Angeles artist’s first major institutional show in the UK — accompanies over 50 of Davis’s works with vintage photographs of Black families that he bought at flea markets. We all have photos like these: yellowing polaroids and scratched Kodak prints of relatives lounging on leather sofas made soft with age, or of cousins in the backyard paddling pool. The “everyday.” But everyday does not necessarily mean mundane. “I wanted Black people to be normal, we are normal right?” said Davis, “But I want it to be more magical.”

For his series 1975, he painted from photographs taken by his mother, Faith Childs-Davis. We see the back of a young man’s head and the soles of his feet as he dives gracefully into a pool. Another man stands in profile beneath towering trees, solitary and shirtless among the foliage. The settings are not inherently extraordinary, but the anonymity of the half-obscured and blurred faces imbues them with a slight sense of the surreal and nonchalantly resists the outsider’s gaze. Your own universe, they seem to echo. 

The ordinary and the fantastical meet in many of these dreamlike works. “40 Acres and a Unicorn” (2007) depicts a young Black boy sitting astride the mythological creature, set against a black background more akin to a void than a starless night sky — or the blackness behind closed eyes while asleep, when such an image might materialize. Looking at it, I am also reminded that the word “utopia” really means “no place.” 

In later works, the tension between the real and fantastical becomes more subtle. His Pueblo del Rio series is based on the eponymous South LA housing project that, like so many social housing complexes, declined from the inner-city Arcadia it originally promised. But Davis reimagines it as a place of quiet, private magic, with Black ballet dancers in white gloves casually performing arabesques in the twilight streets. Deep purples and blues impart an otherworldliness that belies their occurrence in nature. 

If the works in this survey had not conveyed the immense contribution lost with Davis’s untimely death, as it does unfailingly, I imagine a film in the show that features a charmingly self-deprecating Davis being interviewed and working will wrest that sentiment from viewers. This retrospective, which travels to LA’s Hammer Museum this summer, is a remarkable celebration of his life and work.

Noah Davis continues at the Barbican Centre (Silk Street, London, England) through May 11. The exhibition was curated by Wells Fray-Smith. It will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in June.