Antique

Artist Noah Davis founded The Underground Museum to bring world-class art to a neighborhood in Los Angeles — for free. He was just 32 years old when he died from cancer in 2015.

It's a sweltering night in July and Los Angeles' Underground Museum is packed. "It's crowded and hot, but it feels really good," says vistor Jazzi McGilbert. Like much of the crowd, McGilbert is young, creative and African-American. She drove across town to this unassuming, bunkerlike storefront for an event that combines art and activism. The museum is one of her favorite spots in Los Angeles. "I like what it stands for," McGilbert says. "... And the art is incredible."



David Hammons made his 1993/2016 work In the Hood out of a found sweatshirt and fishing wire. The Underground Museum

The Underground Museum aims to promote cutting-edge African-American art, but inclusiveness is also part of its mission. "This is a black space," a message on the museum door reads, "but all are welcome."

When artist Noah Davis founded the museum, he wanted to do two things: sidestep the existing gallery system, with its rigid hierarchies and gatekeepers, and bring world-class art to a neighborhood he likened to a food desert, meaning no grocery stores or museums. Davis died a year ago Monday of a rare form of cancer.

A beyond audacious request

When Davis began working on the museum, he was a rising art world star with powerful friends, like Helen Molesworth, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Molesworth remembers when Davis first asked for her help.

"He wasn't asking for, you know, someone to help him with the marketing ... he was asking us for the art," she says. In other words, he was asking the museum to lend him whatever he wanted from its valuable collection — a beyond audacious request.
"No one had ever asked like that before," Molesworth says. She was intrigued by the idea that an institution like hers could help bring art to people who might not otherwise see it. But she didn't just hand over MOCA's art — first she helped Davis upgrade the Underground Museum's security and HVAC system to protect the art. Then she left it alone.

"I know how to make a museum," Molesworth says. "I don't know how to make an underground museum."

Noah Davis did. When he died from cancer, he was only 32 years old. He left instructions for the next 18 shows, but they're mostly just concepts, titles and lists of the works he wanted to display. In the wake of his death, Megan Steinman joined as the museum's director. She understood their goal of challenging what museums can be.



The three faces that appear in Kerry James Marshall's 2002 Heirlooms and Accessories are taken from a 1930 photograph of a double lynching in Marion, Ind. You can hear Marshall talk about this work



The Underground Museum

"Museums are gorgeous," Steinman says, "but they also come with this idea of how you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to stand and how loud you're supposed to be and if you can talk or not." Also: whether you can afford the entrance fee and how hard it is to get there. "And then you get there and it's like massive walls and these cavernous spaces," she says, "and it's like all these things that are telling your mind how to think before you even get to the artwork itself."

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