Noah Davis (1983-2015) was a great painter, a pioneer of free culture in black working-class Los Angeles and a terrible loss to contemporary art. He died of cancer at the age of 32, leaving a young family, a wildly unconventional gallery and several hundred strange and immemorial paintings.
In LA he is especially remembered for the Underground Museum, established in a row of shops so remote from the city’s hub that wealthy collectors had trouble finding it. It is humorously evoked, at the Barbican, with the “Jeff Koons” vacuum cleaner Davis bought for $70 on Craigslist, the knock-off Duchamp ready-mades, and the William Kentridge film he blagged off a curator at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) – which is where his own paintings would have their first museum display.
