Noah Davis’ first ever retrospective tells the story of an artist who relentlessly painted the haunting beauty of Black lives

I have only cried twice at a museum. The first time was standing in front of Bisa Butler’s larger-than-life quilt portrait of Salt-N-Pepa at an exhibition in New York. The second time was in the elegy room of the Noah Davis retrospective, currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I did not expect to be moved as much as I was, not knowing much about Davis before stepping onto the first floor wing. The PMA show is the final stop of the first-ever museum retrospective of Davis’ art.

The exhibit begins in the hallway, with a floor to ceiling collection of photographs, interspersed with Davis’ handwritten letters and notes.

It’s a collage of Black life — some subjects smiling, holding hands, making silly faces, a picture of Davis himself with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, above a handwritten to-do list that includes, “Spend less money on cigarettes more money on groceries & flowers, books.”

A video of Davis, produced in 2025, runs in a loop at the end of this entrance walkway. The camera is a little too close as the artist is being interviewed at New York’s Tilton Gallery in 2009, the edges of his face sliding outside of the frame. His smile is cheeky as he responds to questions about how long he’s been painting and why he chose painting as an art form.

“I just couldn’t do anything else,” he says.

From the beginning, the entryway’s images ask us to reconsider Davis as an artist. They want us to go beyond his large-scale paintings and give us a glimpse into his multimedia collage, sculpture, and curation work.

Born in 1983 to a lawyer father and an artist mother in Seattle, Davis died in 2015, at the age of 32, of a rare form of cancer.

An awareness of mortality hangs over the exhibit: the shortness of his life and the seeming urgency of the art he made in the time he had. It is a retrospective of a distinctly millennial Black man wanting to celebrate Blackness and the complications held within.

“I just wanted Black people to be normal …” he says in the video. “We are normal, right?”

The answer to that question lies in the aching, sun-drenched, and color drained portraits of nameless Black people he renders. In most of Davis’ work — there are more than 60 pieces in this exhibition — the subjects have faces that are obscured or slightly out of focus, their limbs composed of rough brush strokes and paint drips, some grounded in the real world, others floating in some unknown other place.

Davis’ style lends every image a dreamy universality.

In one room with deep velvet blue walls, we encounter paintings from 2011, when Davis had just become a father and learned of his own father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, not long before a solo exhibition.

A caption tells us he found it hard to paint, consumed by worry and sadness for his dad, who died the day after the exhibition closed, on Dec. 23, 2011.

The piece he ultimately created, Painting for My Dad, is a massive, haunting canvas that places a faceless man at the edge of the endless chasm between worlds. Ahead lies a black, starry sky, and all around him rocks that ground him to this plane. The man carries a lantern in his hand and his posture is hunched, tentative like a little boy, cowed by the wonder and awe of the cosmos.

It is a painting that you have to sit down in front of, be still, pull in your own ragged breaths, and meet with the sadness and wonder with which it was painted.

Throughout the retrospective, Davis’ works call us back to that precipice of emotion.

Sadness. Grief. Hope. Joy.

Each of the six rooms is a deeper exploration of his craft, his dreams for Black people painted on canvas, linen, or wood.

The Pueblo del Rio series (2014) includes stormy renderings of dancers and musicians against the backdrop of one of Los Angeles’ most notorious public housing projects. Savage Wilds (2012) is a burgundy-suffused series, critiquing television stereotypes and their angry incursions on Black life. On canvases about the size of TV screens, scenes from Maury and The Jerry Springer Show are captured in all their manufactured inanity. The Missing Link series (2013) is an ode to the paintings of Mark Rothko, layered against the everyday lives of Black people.

And then there is the 1975 gallery, a series of paintings based on photos taken by Davis’ mom, Faith Childs-Davis.

Facing onto the entry hallway is 1975 (8), a piece that is alive. The bright blue of a summer pool calls to a boy, whose headfirst dive is caught in a perfect arc, his feet pointed toward us, enticing us to follow into the summer day that Davis has made real.

He created this series when he could afford the luxury of buying pre-stretched canvases. Their sepia hues make each of these more uniform canvases look slightly overexposed, perhaps like the photos that inspired them. They are joy, family, memory. They are warm summer light, Afros in empty classrooms, Black uncles, and lazy, crowded pool days in 1975 and every year beyond.

In the last two rooms, we first see a display of small collages Davis created from his hospital bed. The block-printed word Elegy on the wall summarizes a collection of Davis’ final large-scale paintings.

Hazy pinks, lavenders, and light blues bathe these visual conversations about the end of life and the questions left behind. I stood crying in front of a painting that appeared to be an alternate view of the man in Painting for My Dad. The man stands in a color-blocked hallway, still hunched, an arm stretched out slightly before him, almost beckoning to the other side.

What is left is the impression of a legacy of an artist constantly trying, relentlessly attempting. Making love and images to and of the Black body and life for all his days.

“Noah Davis” through April 26, main building, Morgan, Korman, and Field Galleries 150-155, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy., philamuseum.org