Noah Davis at the Hammer Museum: Black Life, Archives, and Legacy

This week, NOMMO had the privilege of experiencing Noah Davis, the Hammer Museum’s first institutional survey dedicated to the late artist (1983–2015). For Tyree Boyd-Pates, NOMMO’s Chief Curator, a museum professional who has spent years leading and shaping exhibitions, walking through this expansive show felt both intimate and revelatory, a rare opportunity to see Davis’s creative life fully realized.

Featuring over 50 works produced between 2007 and 2015, the exhibition traces the breadth of Davis’s practice. His work reflects diverse influences: current events, everyday life, family histories, ancient Egyptian cosmologies, American media’s persistent racism, and the architecture and visual traditions of art history.

Davis drew inspiration from vernacular sources, flea market photographs, personal archives, and found images, transforming the overlooked into sites of imagination. His paintings hover between realism and dreamscape, joy and melancholy, capturing the contradictions inherent in Black lived experience.

Walking through the exhibition, I felt as if I were moving through Davis’s personal archive. Each piece is a testament to his deep care for Black life, memory, and kinship. Having previously visited The Underground Museum, a space Davis co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis, I recognized the continuation of a vision: art as a homeplace, a site of remembrance, and a vehicle for community.

What stands out most is Davis’s relationship to the archive. His visits to flea markets were more than aesthetic exercises; they were acts of reclamation. By collecting fragments of everyday life, he could reimagine and fill gaps in historical memory. This method reflects what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”, the imaginative reconstruction of Black histories that have been silenced or overlooked.

From a curatorial perspective, this exhibition demonstrates how archives, memory, and myth can coexist in ways that feel both personal and universal. It offers a blueprint for museums and cultural institutions striving to present Black art with nuance, care, and historical integrity. At the same time, it affirms NOMMO’s mission: to craft narratives and strategies that honor Black creativity, storytelling, and lived experience.

In presenting Noah Davis, the Hammer Museum not only celebrates an extraordinary artist but also amplifies the legacy of The Underground Museum and the vision Davis shared with Karon. Experiencing this exhibition is a poignant reminder that art, when grounded in care and curiosity, can encompass both the ordinary and the extraordinary, and that Black life, in all its complexity, deserves to be rendered visible and celebrated.