This is Part 1 of a four-part essay. Read the next part here.

Upon First Glance: Abstract

Between the summer of 2019 and the spring of 2020 my wavering confidence in art was restored when I was met with the work of Noah Davis. My first encounter came in a predicably hot Los Angeles summer at The Underground Museum which Noah Davis founded with his wife Karon in 2012. That summer of 2019 I was in the company of my then four-year old daughter Lydia on our first ever vacation. Neither little Lydia nor myself were familiar with the Davis’ life’s work.

Six months later in the chilled early spring of New York, after hearing whispers of a remarkable show by an unfamiliar artist, I visited David Zwirner Gallery. I had not yet realized the painter was the museum founder from the year prior, and that these bridges of connection would continue to appear. Through these visits I learned that I was walking in the path of Davis’ legacy of kinship and community kept alive by those paintings and that small radical museum.

Writing about these visits in hindsight helped me stitch together an inverted experience; where I learned first about the artists community and second about his paintings. Whereas, The Underground Museum was a community for art, the exhibition at David Zwirner was a bespoke elevation of Davis artworks. The David Zwirner exhibition was likewise forged from friendship by curator Helen Molesworth (Molesworth, 2020) but offered a very different perspective. My writing reflected my familial exploration of The Underground Museum and my two independent visits to see Noah Davis’ paintings in 2020.

In this reflection I gather together my experiences in these different spaces without hierarchy or chronology. I weave my memories to create the fabric of my reflection in the wild and true ways I have held them over time. I move through my connection to Davis’ artwork in the formal gallery setting and tie it to the tender time I spent with my daughter in his space. These two experiences are now knotted up together in my psyche as two different ways to see an artist’s legacy in two different spaces.

Introduction

Looking in the Windows

The visit to The Underground Museum in 2019 was a welcoming space for local community and art experiences, whereas, my visit to David Zwirner in 2020 distinguished Davis’ work amidst the tone of a high end blue-chip gallery. The blue-chip title for a gallery reflects their power as a contemporary commercial enterprise by exhibiting and selling notable artwork around the globe. Community spaces like The Underground Museum, by contrast impresses upon the area in which they are established by sharing resources. The community museum is defined by how it harbors creativity relative to the folks that live there. The commercial gallery is austere and white in its presentation which positions artwork as the focal point for an audience of collectors and art goers. Both spaces reflected the cultural production of our times in very different ways.

In this article I refer to the invitation and welcoming I do or do not find in art amidst these spaces. I refer to how the location and investment of the exhibition spaces affected me. I moved through memory and personal experience to identify when that feeling of welcome or unwelcome presented itself. I highlight the ways I transcended different head spaces, location, and context.

I define a projection of the self into artworks as a tool for transcendence that can be as simple as finding the line between green and pink and ascribing meaning to that relationship or as complex as inserting one’s truths into a work of art. When truth slips into mistruth of identity and supremacy a danger zone of history and borders is delineated.

I advocate for accountability over empathy when I step into these danger zones throughout my reflection. I found areas where my white misconceptions told a story of mistruth with Davis’ work. I share my version of accountability as a way to not let empathy stand still in the white feelings of what I can and cannot understand (DuBois, 1989) (Bloom, 2016). I share when my projections have colonizing roots and I trace the origins of my thoughts. I did this as a measure respect and to yield the space of the supremacist white narrative. I then pursed more knowledge and a stronger relationship around my blind spots. This is why the reflection is entitled: “Diving with Davis,” because the more I played with my discomfort as a place where boundaries are built and patrolled internally, the more portals to appreciation, accountability, and connection opened.

Portal Projections

My visits to David Zwirner required consideration of how I attribute my own truths to a work of art and why. I grappled with my connection to class, race, and marginalization and processed my encounters with his work. By contrast, a year prior, I had wandered around the block in an unknown to me LA with my kiddo to find The Underground Museum. Noah Davis founded The Underground Museum with wife Karon Davis in a working class area of Los Angeles, “To ensure that no one has to travel outside the neighborhood to see world-class art, or learn from leading thinkers, educators, chefs, and artists” (The Underground Museum, 2020, para. 2). The Underground Museum in Arlington Heights felt tucked in from the street view, it held the same stature as the corner store filled with treats and necessities very unlike the visibility and stature of David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

Synthesis of the Imaginary

Noah Davis passed away in 2016 but thanks to his sustainable initiative at The Underground Museum I witnessed a community thriving on art. The Underground Museum hosted a special part of Davis’ life’s work, where the legacy of artists live on in people. The day of my visit I talked to some folks in the neighborhood to find the museum and it mattered that the museum felt like that neighborhood. Yet, it was not until I went to David Zwirner in Chelsea, Manhattan that I found how Davis’ paintings bridged the caverns between these two worlds.

This review bounded back and forth between the two contrasting experiences from New York to Los Angeles and it is not linear. Like the dimensions of Davis’ work, this review does not lie flat. The words/marks are nebulous, liquid, supple, brittle, tangible, sticky, and filled with substance. My entry point to his work required that I suspend myself into a brackish familiar liquid where my privilege and whiteness mixes with my various lived pains. Amidst my privileged experience of education in art I relied less on the erudite floatation devices of school and shed their cumbersome forms to immerse myself. The more I suspended myself into the work the more I successfully tread said waters.

I had to be as honest with myself as possible when visiting Davis’ worlds. His work challenged how I was taught to think. It challenged how I was taught to speak in the dialects of a westernized canon. I processed my role in art through Davis’ work and embraced what I did not know. I relied on the abstract space of how I project myself into the work as a realm of imagination where connection to the unknown can occur. This connection to an abstract space of projection and imagination is a non-commodifiable form, or an energy around the art that cannot be bought or sold. My projection began with life experiences which produced a new imaginary around Davis’ work. This connective tissue of projection is how we see ourselves through art and enables a greater collective unconscious when we embark through the imagination of the artist (Jones, 2019). Thanks to this imaginary I traveled in Davis’ work, I occupied a space for which no physical being can occupy, I co-existed in that non-commodifiable energy and appreciated it.

Paint Moves and More

I introduce The Underground Museum and David Zwirner Gallery as hosts for experience. I write about affect not facts. I believe meaning is built by the space in between the facts. The facts of art serve capital and construct borders. I know more-so the spaces we are told not to occupy. I dive into that in-between space of Davis’ work by sharing an acute slip into my psyche and how that moved me to the humility of a liminal space. It is this liminality that helped me foresee the opening of spirit and energy as an element in art that cannot be co-opted, stolen, bought up, or commodified. The opening I experienced in Davis’ work built a new relationships with intangible space that has long been occupied by people but not yet turned into a dollar (Shaviro, 2020). I believe some artists leave a trail through these openings to create new dimensions of understanding in the world.

You can read the next part of this essay here.