Noah Davis’s Paintings Envisioned an Eerie, Ethereal Decolonized World

Noah Davis: The Waiting Room, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas; at David Zwirner.
In 2013, painter Noah Davis founded the Underground Museum (UM) in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles, with his brother, Khalil Joseph, and his wife, Karon Davis. The three aimed to bring museum-quality shows to a historically underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood. Two years later, in August 2015, Davis died of a rare form of cancer at the age of thirty-two. Expertly organized by Helen Molesworth—fo