Noah Davis

Place: Seattle

Born: 1983

Death: 2015

Biography:

Noah Davis was an American painter, installation artist, and founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Born on June 3, 1983, in Seattle, Washington, Davis studied painting at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles.

Early Life and Education

Davis started painting in his early teenage years and had his own studio by the time he was 17. He went on to study painting at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City from 2001 to 2004, though he did not graduate. By 2004, he had moved to Los Angeles and began working at the bookstore at MOCA.

Career

Davis became known for his melancholic portrayals of blurred black figures against barren or shadowy landscapes - paintings that often teetered dangerously into the unreal. During his life, he made approximately four hundred paintings, collages, and sculptures. His paintings are both figurative and abstract, realistic and dreamlike; they are about blackness and the history of Western painting, drawn from photographs and from life. Davis was influenced by European painters Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, as well as American painters such as Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter. He had advanced compositions that rendered three-dimensional but remained flat.

Underground Museum

In 2012, Davis founded the Underground Museum with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, in Arlington Heights, a historically working-class African-American and Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles. They wanted to bring museum-quality art "within walking distance," as he put it, to a community that had no access to it. The Underground Museum is an artist-run, experimental exhibition space made up of a series of interconnected storefronts in Arlington Heights, CA. Davis' original idea behind the space was to "sidestep the gallery system, preferring to bring museum-quality art to a community that had no access to it 'within walking distance,' as he once put it."

• Visit the Noah Davis page on https://Wikioo.org/@/Noah-Davis to learn more about his work and exhibitions.
• Explore the Underground Museum on https://Wikioo.org/Art.nsf/O/A@D3B899 to discover its mission and vision.
• Read about Noah Davis (painter) on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Davis_(painter) to learn more about his life, career, and legacy.

works by Davis include his paintings, such as Over the Hills and Far Away, which showcase his unique style and technique. His use of black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics colliding in his work makes him a standout artist. Davis died at his home in Ojai, California, on August 29, 2015, due to complications from a rare form of soft tissue cancer. His legacy lives on through his work and the Underground Museum, which continues to promote and showcase innovative and thought-provoking art.