LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum at UCLA is presenting Noah Davis, the first U.S. institutional survey of the visionary artist Noah Davis (1983–2015). Following its debut at DAS MINSK in Potsdam and the Barbican in London, this landmark exhibition is a meaningful homecoming to Los Angeles, a city where Davis lived, worked, and left an enduring legacy. The exhibition is on view from June 8 to August 31, 2025. The exhibition will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2026.
Organized chronologically, Noah Davis brings together over 50 works spanning painting, sculpture, and works on paper, offering a comprehensive overview of his practice, including his curatorial and community-building efforts as co-founder of the Underground Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition traces Davis’s prolific career from 2007 until his untimely passing in 2015, featuring works that delve into his exploration of politics, current affairs, everyday life, ancient Egypt, family history, racism in American media, art history, and architecture. His paintings are presented alongside his experimental works in sculpture and works on paper, offering a deeper look into the conceptual foundations of his practice. The exhibition also includes a selection of Davis’s eclectic source material on display for the first time.
Hammer Museum director Zoë Ryan said, “We are proud to present this retrospective of Noah Davis’s work in Los Angeles, a city that continues to feel his impact as an artist and a builder of communities. Noah’s career was tragically cut short but nonetheless extraordinary, as this internationally touring exhibition demonstrates. He was also a great supporter of artists who felt overlooked by other institutions, and through the Underground Museum created a welcoming space for artists and audiences alike, greatly enriching the cultural fabric of this city. This exhibition is a celebration of Noah’s life and legacy.”
Davis’s figurative paintings capture the emotional and fantastical textures of everyday life. Primarily based in Los Angeles, he felt a “responsibility to represent the people around me,” drawing on an expansive pool of references—from anonymous vintage photography found in flea markets and personal archives, to film and television, music, literature, art history, and his own imagination. Through his vivid cast of characters—some real, some fictional—he depicted scenes of people diving into swimming pools, sleeping, dancing, and looking at public art. Davis fluidly moved between painting styles, often using unorthodox techniques and a diverse palette to create images that were both realistic and dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic.
Davis was deeply invested in the idea that art should be accessible to everyone. In 2012, he and his wife, fellow artist Karon Davis, co-founded the Underground Museum, in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. They converted four storefronts into a cultural center that was free and open to all, transforming the parking lot into a garden planted with purple flowers in homage to Prince. In his lifetime, Davis used the Underground Museum as a studio, a site for residencies, and an exhibition space, negotiating with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) to lend their collection in a three-year partnership starting in 2014. By the time he died in 2015, he had planned 18 exhibitions for the Underground Museum using MOCA’s collection, motivated by the desire to “change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art.”
Noah Davis’s profound influence on contemporary art and the cultural fabric of Los Angeles is reflected throughout this exhibition, which unites key works from his groundbreaking career. Highlights include 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), a striking blend of fantasy and history; Isis (2009), a portrait of his wife Karon depicted as the titular Egyptian goddess of magic; and the Pueblo del Rio series (2014), paintings that reimagine one of the oldest, largest, and most architecturally significant public housing developments in Los Angeles. Through these works and more, Noah Davis offers a comprehensive look at the visionary artist’s practice and lasting influence.
Born in Seattle, Washington in 1983, Davis had his first painting studio in high school. He briefly studied film and art at Cooper Union in New York before leaving to pursue his own artistic education. By 2004 he had moved to Los Angeles and was working at the famed bookstore Art Catalogues, where he could feed his appetite for a wide-reaching history of culture and, in particular, painting. Drawing on the legacy of artists ranging from Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko, Romare Bearden to Kerry James Marshall, he developed a distinctive painterly style—one that engaged deeply with both the histories of representation and abstraction. Davis blended historical and contemporary source material to create images of Black life that are unbound by a specific time or place. To show Black life with beauty, majesty, joy, and humor was both a risk and a necessity; Davis painted at a time of acute racism and systemic violence in the United States, a country where identity has often been weaponized through the circulation of images in the media and what were then newly formed social media platforms.
