Visitors

I have kept close throughout this review to my intuition and the slippery slopes of conceptual agency in Davis’ work. I had gone to The Underground Museum just six months before in the summer of 2019. I did not know what it would mean to me later when seeing Davis’ work for the first time at his retrospective. Instead, I learned about his home first and his work second. I learned through an initial experience with no frame of reference. I found out that The Underground Museum was a place that many folks loved. It is where my friends told me to go. They did not tell me why– they just sent me there. They were right to do this. When I went to that place I had to hunt to find it. I had never been to a museum that lived like a home before. Although it was big on the inside, it was but tucked in from the street view. The Underground Museum was part of a neighborhood and my experience there with my daughter was one of a wandering and discovery.

Altars and Children

I visited with my Lydia and if I remember correctly, this was her first museum visit. She was little and happy. She was doing much better than I, who still struggles with the poverty of my youth. I had certainly not gone to a museum until adulthood. I am still playing catch-up with art and fear of hunger from those years. So that day I let her lead. I followed my child around and contemplated how little I get to see her and what that means to me as a working mom, a student, an artist, and teacher.

She and I meandered around a working class neighborhood in Los Angeles to find The Underground Museum. We moved in tandem as fast-walking East Coast kids looking for signage and clear demarcations of our familiar over-regulated stomping grounds. But on that hot summer day, in a new place out west, we did not locate the museum until I asked for help. I went into a corner store, bought a bottle of water and a hug (a sugary drink) for Lydia and asked the owner where I was. They kindly told me where to look and pointed us on. Our visit maintained this casual and neighborly tone as we colored our time with exploration and curiosity.

The Underground Museum was between shows, which means it was mostly empty. So I looked closely at the composition of the space. Inside was not a grand space. It was not a cathedral or museum because there was something tender to it. A small bar was poised by the door leading through to a garden and gravel courtyard. I processed how I felt, and it met me as a humble place of worship when Lydia wandered outside. Outside in the courtyard the sunlight and collective seating carried my eye over a stone fence to see other buildings and backyards. This closeness gave me a quiet sense of place and pleasure from where we stood.

As I walked with Lydia I noted the central placement of an altar. A man had passed away and it this was a place to remember them. I felt the vastness of this loss when Lydia scooped up a praying mantis in the lawn and headed right for the altar. I stopped with a tinge of intrusion. I did not know what to do. I was raised Catholic and Southern Baptist and I knew reprimand in two non-complementary forms for disturbing the dead.   

What she was about to do came with such rules in my past. I felt she was not exempt in her child state to take. I moderated my adult urge to intervene on a child’s discovery of life in death. So when she removed a small shell from the altar I waited to find a moment to pause with her. I looked at her eyes that do not look like mine and asked her what she had found. With one hand holding this mantis and the other with a shell she answered me frankly, “a seashell”. I let her know that, the small shell meant something special to someone and they had put it there because they loved someone who had gone. I explained how I understood it, so that she could take it, but give back with something she loves.

It mattered to me that she understood you don’t take something from someone without giving back and that she might not know the love in that shell. She processed that information with a surprising ease. I was halfway to the door when she put the mantis and the shell together on the table. Lydia had disrupted the serenity of an altar and comprehended how she was invited to do so. She also decided that she accepted the terms of reciprocity in that shell and acknowledged how to respect the bereaved and dead, even if you are but a stranger and a child.

Intentions

That night Lydia lost her most beloved possession just a few blocks away. We searched for hours for her stuffed owl “Owlison”. That lost stuffed owl revealed to me that sacrifice needs to be intentional. There is a difference between lost and given up. She saw through the raw anxiety I felt. I misplaced my child’s source of joy and her juvenile comprehension of exchange reminded me to leave something behind too. It reminded to not take with misplaced intentions and that no matter how we feel we are never out of place. She and I are learning together to leave things better than we found them.

That night I offered up my fear of the unreal. Lydia was led to the altar for a reason and we both worked through what sacrifice and offering truly is. It was an unforeseen primer for a longer conversation with Davis’ work.

You can read the next part of this essay here.