Known for his melancholic portraits of blurred black figures set in arid, shady, almost surreal landscapes, Noah Davis has created about 400 collages, sculptures and paintings poised between the real and the dreamlike world. In these works, black aesthetics and modernist aesthetics face and clash. In 2012, together with his wife Karon, who is a sculptor, he founded the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights, an African-American and Latino working-class neighbourhood in Los Angeles, bringing museum-quality art to a community that did not have access to it. Even after his death, at the age of only 32, Davis’ spirit is still present in the Museum, which has now become not only one of the most important centres for black art in the country, but also a meeting place and a crucial landmark for the neighbourhood.
