Noah Davis

 

January 24–April 26, 2026 

Philadelphia Art Museum

 

Noah Davis, The Conductor, 2014 

 

October 30, 2025 – The Philadelphia Art Museum announces a landmark survey of the late American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015). Bringing together over 60 works, this exhibition will chart Davis’s practice across painting, sculpture, works on paper, and curating, marking the final stop on an international tour organized with DAS MINSK in Potsdam, the Barbican in London, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. 

 

Davis’s work captures the intricacies of Black life with tenderness and depth, linking personal and collective narratives in ways that profoundly resonate with our times. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition will feature work made from 2007 until his untimely death in 2015, addressing a wide range of subjects, including politics, family histories, mythology, race, architecture, and visual culture. His masterfully constructed paintings—which fluidly move between styles and techniques to alternately depict dreamlike, joyful, melancholic, and even surreal scenes—will be shown alongside his experimental sculptures and works on paper that speak to the conceptual foundations of Davis’s practice. 

 

Davis was deeply invested in the idea that art should be accessible to all. In 2012, he and his wife, fellow artist Karon Davis, cofounded the Underground Museum in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. They converted four storefronts into a free cultural center, transforming the parking lot into a garden planted with purple flowers. For a period, Davis used the Underground Museum as a studio, as well as a site for residencies, and an exhibition space, eventually entering into a partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to lend works from their collection starting in 2014. By the time of his death, Davis had planned 18 exhibitions for the Underground Museum using MOCA’s collection—the majority of which remain unrealized— motivated by the desire to “change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art.”

 

Highlights from the exhibition will 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 Egyptian goddess; Savage Wilds (2012), a series in which Davis cast his gaze upon the complex portrayals of Black subjects on daytime television; and the renowned Pueblo del Rio series (2014), paintings that reimagined one of the oldest, largest, and most architecturally significant public housing developments in Los Angeles. 

 

The exhibition is curated by Eleanor Nairne, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of Department at the Philadelphia Art Museum and former Barbican Senior Curator, and Wells Fray-Smith, Curator, Barbican.

 

 “On every encounter, I am struck again by the potency of Noah Davis’s work and it is an honor to share his practice with audiences in Philadelphia,” said Nairne. “Given how voraciously he drew from art history, I like to think that he would have been glad to be in the rich company of the museum’s collections.” 

 

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalog of essays and archival material copublished by Prestel, with original texts by Tina M. Campt, Wells Fray-Smith, Paola Malavassi, Eleanor Nairne, and Claudia Rankine. Additional contributors include Dawoud Bey, T. J. Clark, Francesco Clemente, Karon Davis, Marlene Dumas, Helen Molesworth, and Jason Moran.

https://www.philamuseum.org 

 

 

NYCB Gallery (385) 노아 데이비스(1983-2015)의 멜란콜리한 캔버스@데이빗 즈워너 갤러리(1/16-2/22, 2020)

 

노아 데이비스 Noah Davis

 

January 16—February 22, 2020

David Zwirner: 525 & 533 West 19th St.

 

Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015