Noah Davis

Barbican Art Gallery, London, 6 February – May 2025

Review by Colin Grant

An African American boy propels himself into the air, diving into an outdoor swimming pool; a lone trumpeter in marching band regalia, his eyes fixed on the viewer, blows his tunes in a quiet, tree-lined social housing complex; a child separated from his playmates, his arms spread out, levitates. Welcome to the world of Noah Davis, whose richly atmospheric paintings not only record scenes themselves but also evoke their sounds, like the anticipated splash of the dive into the pool. 

Davis is determined to paint ordinary lives where his subjects’ blackness is not foregrounded or pathologised. Rather, the artist is more concerned with the group dynamics of people than capturing an individual’s distinctive features. This is especially true of scenes of black people interacting socially in the series 1975, inspired by photos taken by his mother Faith Childs-Davis, a decade on from the civil rights movement. The series portrays communities joyfully embracing everyday spaces, like basketball courts and swimming pools, that were out of bounds to them during the dark days of segregation and Jim Crow. ‘I wanted to take these anonymous moments and make them permanent,’ Davis once asserted – a sentiment that animates his work. 

The Barbican’s retrospective of the artist, who surfaced with his first solo show in 2009 and soared thereafter, reveals that Davis’s ambitions extended to creating opportunities for other artists and audiences from impoverished communities.

Davis was aware that most well-funded galleries and museums in the US were located in neighbourhoods where black people were rarely found. With his partner Karon Vereen, he opened The Underground Museum in Los Angeles in 2012. ‘This is a black space, but all are welcome,’ trumpeted the sign above the door; and this generosity permeates Davis’s work. He took an approach similar to that of the African American playwright August Wilson to make art for, by and near black people. In his short life, Davis, who was born in 1983 and died aged thirty-two from cancer, aimed to provide ‘inner-city neighbourhoods with free access to world class art.’ That world class art included his own. 

The body of Davis’s work is a curious and affecting mix of the playful and profound. Many of the outdoor paintings are pregnant with feeling; they give off a charged atmosphere reminiscent of a thunderstorm that is still clearing. The mostly muted colours of his palette – pale mustards, powder blues, subtle greens – bathe and bleed into the canvases, sometimes as washes and at other times in textured layers that are intentionally incomplete. They give an impression of care and gentleness; Davis’s rendering of colour further imbues the subjects of the paintings with an intriguing innocence. This is apparent in Untitled, 2015, a portrait of two sleeping young women slouched on a couch. The innocence is there too in Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque depicting synchronised tutu-wearing ballerinas who dance on the lawns of a working class housing project. 

Numerous works attest to Davis’s keen eye for architectural composition in the integration of modernist buildings in his paintings. The Missing Link 4 conjures the steel and glass facade of Mies van der Rohe’s housing development in Detroit’s Lafayette Park. Though the housing complex is vast, Davis’s subjects are not dwarfed or intimidated by it. 

But even as the paintings project a kind of grace – as a corrective, perhaps, to the negative narratives about life in housing projects such as Los Angeles’s Pueblo del Rio – there’s also a tug of sadness about them. Though they’re a reminder of the power of art and architecture to transform lives, a mournful afterlife haunts the Pueblo del Rio paintings. They speak to the envisaged utopias of garden cities rather than report on the existential challenge of the brutal and neglected ghettos that they became. Like many accomplished artists, Davis leaves room for people’s imaginative engagement with his work. The mournfulness of the paintings captures a truth, highlighted by the lone trumpeter in Pueblo del Rio: Prelude who, I imagine, emits a blue note and whose melancholy pervades the Barbican show. 

Even before Davis became aware of his own terminal illness, his work frequently illuminated the mordant certainty of death. In Painting for My Dad, a young man bearing a lantern appears ambiguously to exit a cave. But rather than emerging into the light, he stares into a Stygian abyss. In the ink-black night, even though it is flecked with stars, there’s a sense of foreboding, of imminent loss. The painting is a tribute to his father, Keven, who only had months to live when Davis moved home to be closer to him.

This elegiac but ultimately uplifting exhibition culminates in three works completed in Davis’s final year, when he knew that he too had not long to live. In an untitled painting, a forlorn man, older than his chronological years, is bent over as he trudges down the street. There is no escaping his destiny. The work prefigures a poignant companion piece: a portrait of pallbearers and friends standing respectfully silent beside a coffin at the side of a grave. It’s impossible to read the painting other than as a clear-eyed rehearsal for Davis’s own funeral, just two years after his father’s.

‘I think Noah may be more powerful from the other side,’ his brother, the fellow artist Kahlil Joseph, said after his death. The spirituality that informed Davis’s art practice is echoed in the tone, tenderness and, in some instances, the ecstasy of the paintings. The resonance of Davis’s work may be amplified by the knowledge of his tragic early death, but its impact comes from his ability to reach for and create beguiling, ‘anonymous moments’ and a world which, once seen and heard, cannot be unheard or unseen. In the searching retrospective at the Barbican, Noah Davis proves himself to be an artist of substance, whose work has an extraordinarily striking permanence.

Colin Grant

Colin Grant is Director of WritersMosaic and the author of six non-fiction books.