Noah Davis: In Detail

About the Author

American artist Noah Davis's (1983-2015) body of work encompasses his lush, sensual figurative paintings as well as an ambitious institutional project called The Underground Museum, a black-owned and -operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Helen Molesworth is a Los Angeles-based writer and curator. She has organized monographic exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Luc Tuymans among others. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

Franklin Sirmans has been the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since fall 2015. Prior to his appointment he was the department head and curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 2010 until 2015.

Thomas J. Lax is curator of media and performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. They were the inaugural recipient of the Cisneros Research Grant and traveled to Brazil in 2020 to research contemporary Black art.

Glenn Ligon is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Julie Mehretu is a world renowned painter who lives and works in New York. In exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social, Mehretu's works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space. She is the recipient of The MacArthur Award (2005) and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015).

Fred Moten is professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University. He is interested in social movement, aesthetic experiment, and black study. Moten has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, the latest of which-co-authored with Stefano Harney-is All Incomplete.

Lindsay Charlwood is a director at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles. She worked closely with Noah Davis during his lifetime, organizing multiple exhibitions of his work that include solo shows at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, California, and Tilton Gallery in New York.