Noah Davis
b. 1983, United States
d. 2015
American painter and installation artist, 1983-2015
Born in Seattle, Washington, Noah Davis (1983–2015) studied painting at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he founded the Underground Museum in the city’s Arlington Heights neighborhood with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis.
Davis’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (2008, 2010, and 2013); Tilton Gallery, New York (2009 and 2011); PAPILLION, Los Angeles (2014); and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2016), among others. Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth opened at the Underground Museum on the same day as the artist’s untimely death at age thiry-two, due to complications from a rare cancer. In 2016, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, presented the two-person exhibition Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum—the first large-scale museum show to explore Davis’s work alongside that of his brother’s. In 2020, an acclaimed solo presentation of Davis’s work was on view at David Zwirner, New York, a select portion of which will travel to the Underground Museum in December 2021.
The artist’s work is featured in the landmark exhibition 30 Americans, which was organized by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, and has been traveling extensively throughout the United States from 2008 to the present (the exhibition is currently on view at the Arlington Museum of Art, Texas, through 5 September 2021, and subsequently travels to the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, in October 2021). Davis’s work has been included in other notable group exhibitions, including ones held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2010 and 2020); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012 and 2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2018).