Speaking on Joni Mitchell’s jazz era, fellow singer Kelela recently said, “I’ve always been in love with music that kind of sits on a fault line, or feels like it’s excavating new space.” Maybe this was why I chose Kelela’s recent album, Blue Note (Unplugged) as the soundtrack to my first visit to late American artist Noah Davis’s current Barbican retrospective. Davis’ visual world balances atop multiple fault lines, offering us other frequencies, or practices of attunement, for looking at Blackness. 

In his paintings, Black figures drift at the edge of recognition, their faces blurred, their bodies sometimes dissolving into dreamlike, half-formed landscapes, much like the way that Kelela’s voice glides through reimagined melodies, reshaping familiar compositions into something at once intimate and elusive. Both artists tap into the emotional textures of Black life, toggling between the real and the imagined, the lived and the dreamed, with a sense of quiet surrealism. 

Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1983, Davis went on to study painting at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. In 2004, he dropped out and settled in Los Angeles, where his job at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s bookstore allowed for the extensive study of art history and catalogues. By 2007, he was exhibiting widely, gaining recognition for his intimate, enigmatic compositions that resisted the instrumentalising gaze – one that looks at Blackness not to see it in its variousness, but to extract from it. Davis did this not by retreating from figuration, but by working within and against it. 

Over his short but prolific career, Davis produced roughly four hundred works – paintings, collages, and sculptures – before his untimely passing in 2015 at the age of 32, from a rare form of tissue cancer. Today, his influence extends beyond his canvases. Having co-founded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles with his wife and fellow artist Karon, Davis envisioned “a Black space, but [one where] all are welcome,” where Black art could thrive on its own terms, independent of institutional gatekeeping.

If Kelela’s Blue Note (Unplugged) is “memory revised and remixed,” Davis’s paintings offer a striking counterpoint: history collapsed into a resounding, otherworldly present. This revisioning of the past is central to Davis’s practice, where the surreal and the fantastical become tools for reimagining Black past, present, and future. 

The exhibition’s opening work, 40 Acres and a Unicorn, is the perfect example. Against a dark, nearly void-like horizon, a young Black man perches on top of a white unicorn. The title nods to the broken promise of an 1865 decree that some formerly enslaved Black families would be granted 40 acres and a mule after the American Civil War – a dream deferred that has come to symbolise reparations unrealised. By replacing the mule with a unicorn, Davis inserts fantasy into the historical record. The unicorn isn’t just whimsical; it’s a cipher for the absurdity of waiting on justice, and a refusal to bind Black hope to systems that were never built with our freedom in mind. It’s this kind of visual play – layered, ironic, melancholic, magical – that allows Davis to collapse time, turning historical betrayal into a suggestion of a justice-to-come.

A term that sprung to mind as I wandered through the exhibition was the scholar Kevin Quashie’s expression “Black Aliveness.” I love how aliveness seems to speak directly to the Black interiority and worldmaking capacity present in Davis’s works. This lens invites us to consider what becomes possible when we shift our attention away from Black death, injury, and subjection, and instead toward the quiet, the relational, the quotidian. Building on a talk that writer and poet Claudia Rankine recently gave at the Barbican, Noah Davis: Approaches to Autobiography, we should ask – how might we embrace a Black gaze? One that, as Tina Campt writes, ‘shifts the optics of “looking at” to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another’?

Davis’s 1975 series – a collection of paintings inspired by his mother Faith’s photography – mobilises that gaze. Translated from a recovered roll of film used during Faith’s youth on the South Side of Chicago, Davis engages in a kind of double-seeing: stepping into the frame while reimagining it through his own artistic lens. As Faith herself reflected, “I took photos for the pure pleasure of having permission to look more closely, to look a little longer… Photography was a way for me to frame a future for myself.” Davis’s paintings extend this act of looking, not only as an excavation of the past but as an ongoing process of Black world-building.

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Set in a moment in which Black communities were emerging from the long shadow of Jim Crow and stepping into the height of the Black Power movement, this series also foregrounds the everyday ease of Black social life – scenes of leisure, play, and effortless interaction that, historically, were rarely granted visual representation. Davis transforms the swimming pool, a site of historical exclusion and segregation, into a space of assembly and fluidity. In 1975 (8), 2013, a young Black boy dives – we might imagine, not just into the water but into Black life itself. The other figures lounge, dip their feet and gather in conversation. You can almost hear the layered racket of voices, the humming sounds of a summer afternoon, and the momentary hush before the boy meets the water. Davis lingers in that suspended beat, waiting for the splash. There’s no spectacle here, no narrative climax. Instead, there’s a kind of ambient sociality, a mood. 

In his 2013 Missing Link series, art-historical references are remixed as part of his broader desire to construct an “alternative canon” that acknowledges and integrates Black subjects. The fourth painting in the series, Missing Link 4, depicts Lafayette Park, a vast housing project in downtown Detroit. But for Lafayette Park to exist, a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood had to be razed – a common reality under federally funded “urban renewal” programs of the 1950s-70s. Davis, however, recasts the space as one of community and leisure, depicting Black residents in a scene of ease and togetherness, with the apartment blocks’ windows reflecting sky, grass, and children swimming below. In his blend of references – the grids of Mark Bradford and the block colour and concrete of Mark Rothko – Davis delivers that stamp of eclecticism that echoes throughout his body of work. 

In Missing Link 1 (2013), Davis overlays paint onto an inkjet print of children playing in a front-yard. Unlike the gridded, urban architecture in Missing Link 4, Missing Link 1’s front lawn setting invites breath – a suburban green, suggestive of safety, cleaner air, of a Black social life unburdened by constraint. A young boy hovers inexplicably above the others, arms outstretched, with his face only vaguely defined. The painting is vaguely reminiscent of the ascension paintings in Christian art in which Christ rises while his disciples behold the event below. The Black boy’s arms extend outward, though toward whom or what remains unknown. In this framing, the viewer – I think, especially the Black viewer – becomes implicated. Is it not our role to assist the boy, to meet his outstretched hands? What does it mean to bear witness to, insist on, to nurture Black life?

Davis had an encyclopedic knowledge of art history, but was also obsessed with everyday imagery. Both influences come together in what the Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe has called a ‘wake work’ – a work that acknowledges the ongoing effects of slavery and anti-Blackness, while simultaneously imagining possibilities for Black life and resistance. This act of annotating Black life from the inside inscribes history differently on the body. As writer and historian Saidiya Hartman writes in her book Scenes of Subjection, the Black body has been subjected to a “crisis of referentiality,” arising from the fact that enslaved people were often reduced to numbers, commodities, and objects in historical archives rather than recognised as individuals with agency and humanity. 

Addressing this crisis, Davis masterfully plays with referentiality and obscurity. As Davis said himself, he wanted to “take anonymous moments and make them permanent”. He saw the value in the everyday moments of Black social life; spending his spare time rummaging through flea markets for vintage photographs and family albums; browsing internet photo sharing sites and using his mother’s own photography. His is a Black gaze that is for-each-other, rather than for-the-other.

In his work, Black aliveness is not a spectacle, but a sustained mode of seeing. It resists the oversimplified framing of “Black complexity,” a term often reductively used to describe the work of Black artists who, as Sarah Lewis noted in a 2021 Artnet interview, remain “over-exhibited and under-theorised.” Davis’s paintings reject the tendency to be viewed solely through the lens of political symbolism, which often dominates how Black art is received in Western galleries and institutions. 

As a gallery-goer invested in how art shapes and transforms our relationship with the world, I have found myself frustrated that the inclusion of Black artists is often framed as an overdue corrective, rather than an engagement with their artistic merit. This moral imperative – where Black artists are celebrated for their late arrival, rather than their innovation – has contributed to what has been termed an “anti-critical disposition”, where Black artists are often grouped together despite their distinct approaches and visions. In abstract art, this results in the oversimplification of Black artistic production as a metaphor for historical trauma. In figurative art, the mere presence of Black subjects in predominantly white spaces is frequently treated by critics as significant in itself, overshadowing deeper, more thoughtful explorations. 

It’s also difficult to ignore that Davis’s exhibition arrives in the wake of the Barbican’s recent censorship of pro-Palestinian voices, including the cancellation of a public talk by Pankaj Mishra, and a sit-in organised by Cultural Workers for Palestine last year. In this context, the contradictions of institutional inclusion become even harder to ignore. Despite this, hopeful counterpoints come from within Davis’s retrospective. In particular, the spotlight on his Underground Museum, which gave free access to art for Black and Latinx residents of Arlington Heights, serves as an important reminder that community-centred, culturally affirming art spaces can and do exist. 

Davis himself once quipped, “I wanted Black people to be normal. We are normal, right? …. But I wanted it to be more magical.” It’s a sentiment that resonates especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter, a moment in which many Black audiences are fatigued with trauma-centric storytelling, and Black artists still struggle against demands to narrate racial trauma. To paint, in Davis’s world, is to carve space for Black life beyond these representational mandates. It is a quiet refusal, an insistence on Black life as expansive, intimate, and unburdened by the demands of visibility. I’m reminded of what Toni Morrison writes in her novel Home, that she sought to carve away “the accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence embedded in race language so that other kinds of perception were not only available but inevitable.” 

Davis’ work enacted that inevitability. To step into his world is not just to witness, but to inherit its possibility. In Davis’ space, we are called to recognise Black presence as abundant, Black aliveness as inevitable. Perhaps these are the terms of our surrender. 

• Ishy Pryce-Parchment is based in London, working through language, sound, and image.

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All images © The Estate of Noah Davis, Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner