Noah Davis at The Hammer

June 8–August 31, 2025

Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque (2014). Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 inches. Image courtesy of the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Collection of Miguel. Photo: Kerry McFate.

Noah Davis, Noah Davis (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the Estate of Noah Davis and Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

One morning, while I was driving down Vermont Avenue, traffic slowed to a stop. I was three cars behind a yellow school bus with its hazard lights on, ostensibly waiting for someone to return to the driver’s seat. As it turned out, the driver of the bus was a maintenance worker who had been tasked with covering up graffiti tags on a city wall. I spotted her nearby, passing her paint roller up and down the muted gray building façade, creating an imperfect rectangle in a slightly different shade of grey. I was observing the creation of what the late artist Noah Davis called “hood Rothkos,” a nod to the large, rectangular color fields of Mark Rothko’s abstract expressionist paintings. As I drove away, I considered that this fleeting moment was impactful likely because it mirrored the way Davis elevated the mundane to the level of mythology. The artist consistently found ways to transform the everyday experiences of Black life in particular into scenes woven with art history, personal narrative, and magic.

Davis dubbed these hyper-local cityscape versions of Rothkos as “hood” in an effort to code-switch between Rothko’s elite, internationally-known aesthetic and a more culturally specific version of the same idea. “I guess you can say I’m fascinated with instances where Black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics collide,” Davis once said.¹ This collision is also evident in his depiction of Black ballerinas in housing projects, seen in Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque (2014), which similarly unites the stilted upper-class appeal of ballet with urban vernacular. At the Hammer in Los Angeles, where the first institutional survey of Davis’s work was recently on view, we saw Davis traveling through space and time, exhibiting relationships with the past (legacy artists), present (quotidian realities), and future (ruminations on the afterlife) in a way that conveyed how deeply he was committed to documenting histories and creating art for audiences both contemporary and in the future, particularly as he surrendered to the cancer diagnosis that claimed his life at age 32 in 2015.

The traditional art canon is somewhat infamously compromised by an ahistorical lack of imagination; the “greats,” as we know them, are fossilized into history and cultural memory for many without truly knowing why. Who decides what art endures, and what is that longevity based on? Davis seemed to reach toward these questions through various styles and subject matter, often blending Black aesthetics and L.A. vernacular culture with allusions to Western art history—perhaps to reflexively answer them for himself. He performed this questioning perhaps no more blatantly than through his playful adaptation of the styles popularized by mainstream darlings, including Piet Mondrian, Édouard Manet, and even Marcel Duchamp—sometimes going as far as copying previously produced artworks outright.

At the Hammer, a lavender-lit room set aglow by fluorescent lights à la Dan Flavin housed a collection of pieces that made up some of Davis’s 2015 show, Imitation of Wealth, which was originally held at his much-beloved Underground Museum, a space he founded with his wife (the artist Karon Davis) on Washington Boulevard in 2012. The show featured copycat versions of career-defining works by other sneakily clever artists: a sand and mirror corner work akin to indoor “Non-Site” pieces by Earthwork artist Robert Smithson; a vitrine-encased vacuum mimicking Jeff Koons’s New Hoover Convertible (1980); and a bottle rack identical to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, Bottle Rack (1914).

The Imitation of Wealth show manifested after Davis was unable to successfully secure museum loans of the aforementioned works to exhibit in his own institution, located in South L.A.; in these instances of intentional mimicry, Davis was not imitating wealth as much as he was satirizing it. Though he literally referenced past artists in these works, Davis’s trickster spirit² evoked folkloric allegory: Instead of being defeated by denial from white institutions, he bested the system by creating artworks that slyly comment on the arbitrariness of value. And if value is in the eye of the beholder, then so too is what we choose to commemorate.

Much of what Davis canonized on his canvases were references to Black life, often blended with references to the “masters” (a loaded double entendre, if you zoom out). While the painter’s imitations were a comment on the market, the art historical canon, and larger systems of power, some of his other series illustrate how the aesthetics of the canon (styles we’ve inherited as era- and movement-defining defaults) can be artfully inserted alongside more intimate cultural codes to create new meaning.

The Missing Link 3 (2013) shows a man with a briefcase walking through a city block, a “hood Rothko” in the background framing his foregrounded body. The muted color palette of greys, deep teals, and desaturated purples suggests the drudgery of heading to (or from) a long day at work; the man’s posture implies that he has planted his steps on this stretch of sidewalk—in this precise way—so many times that he has become a part of the scenery. This series struck me as a quieter attempt than Imitation of Wealth to hold a mirror up to the art world, asking it to look at itself when answering the question of what deserves to be pedestaled and what is allowed to wither unremarkably into the past. Davis’s painting instantly becomes legitimized (or, less easily ignored) thanks to the presence of a Rothko-like gesture, complicating the establishment’s historically natural impulse to neglect the beauty of Black figuration. And beyond this challenging of dominant narratives, these works made the aesthetics of white masterpieces more accessible to Davis’s Black, L.A. community.

Davis craftily used pre-existing styles (read: proven templates of artistic success) as conceptual readymades for him to map his own would-be artistic legacy onto, reworking it in his own image and vision. Davis’s referencing of art historical giants was his way of manifesting that he too join the pantheon of the canon; by bringing together the specificity of Black subject matter with canonical expressions of modern art, he was creatively in conversation with these artists in an attempt to decode what it means to build a legacy, both personally and collectively. Often, the only difference between Art and art, as it were, is who creates it.

Ultimately, Davis’s oeuvre is unified by his fixation on the fact that what we create is how we’re remembered, and the subject matter of his paintings that make blatant art historical references point to an artist’s preoccupation with their own lasting contributions to the industry. Mortality is intrinsic to this line of thinking and exemplified in Painting for My Dad (2011), a depiction of the artist’s father staring down the abyss of the afterlife. In other bodies of work in Noah Davis at the Hammer, we were let into other details of a life well lived: The show included paintings depicting youth at a swimming pool and falling in love as a young adult, as well as a series of collages made with his son from a hospital bed as Davis himself grew closer to joining the realm of the ancestors. Davis’s references and mimicries became a way for him to insert himself into the lasting narrative; the blending of past, present, and future in his works comes from a deep fascination with what was, and what will be once we become infinite.

Evan Nicole Brown is a Los Angeles-born writer, editor, and journalist who covers the arts and culture. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Dwell, Getty Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, L.A. Times Image, The New York Times, T Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the founder and host of Group Chat, a conversation series in L.A.

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