Sidecar Gallery - From Common Ground, presented by Fondation Valmont

Courtesy of Sidecar Gallery:

Sidecar Gallery is delighted to present From Common Ground, a group exhibition featuring work by Los Angeles area artists Sarah Awad, Marwa Abdul-Rahman, Mira Dancy, Kenturah Davis, Brad Eberhard, Asher Hartman, Alice Könitz, Ruby Neri, Laura Howard Parker, Camilla Taylor, Patricia Valencia, Emmett Walsh, and Eric Zammitt. From Common Ground will be on view from July 12 - August 23, 2025 at Sidecar Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. There will be an opening reception from 6-8pm on July 12, including a performance by Marcos Lutyens.

The works by artists in From Common Ground engage with a robust variety of themes ranging from tensions between figuration and abstraction in painting, to land use and water rights in the American Southwest, and ideas about the collective and individual human experiences in the natural world.

This exhibition is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Fondation Valmont through its mission to promote contemporary art, foster intercultural dialogues, and support visual artists on a global scale.

From Common Ground is curated by Salim Moore, academic curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, and brings together a creative exchange of work by artists with roots in Altadena, California. The artists were assembled through a collaboration between the Fondation Valmont, Marcos Lutyens, and Night Gallery

California African American Museum - Ode to ‘Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena

From the California African American Museum:

April 15 - October 12, 2025

curated by: Dominique Clayton, independent curator

In January 2025, wildfires erupted in Los Angeles, ripping through residential neighborhoods on both the west and east sides of the county. On the west side, the Palisades Fire consumed the oceanside communities of Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. On the east side, the Eaton Fire set ablaze the mountainside communities of Pasadena and Sierra Madre and overtook the town of Altadena, reducing much of it to ash.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Altadena was home to a burgeoning Black community and was hailed as the epicenter of Black arts activity in Los Angeles County. Though this designation arguably shifted to the South Central neighborhood of Watts in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Altadena continued to develop as a vibrant and creative haven with a distinctive Black cultural imprint. Since then, Altadena and the adjacent city of Pasadena have served as home to an extraordinary array of Black artists, educators, musicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and activists.

Ode to ’Dena lauds the rich and dynamic Black cultural heritage of Altadena. It surveys the town’s enduring legacy through the work and stories of an intergenerational group of artists and culture bearers that have called it home.

Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena is curated by Dominique Clayton, independent curator and founder of Dominique Gallery, in community with Larry Earl, Kenturah Davis, Arianne Edmonds, Dylan Joyner, and V. Joy Simmons, MD.

"altadena" Edition and Accordion Press Launch

Kenturah Davis, via accordion press:

I am pleased to share the inaugural edition of accordion press, a design studio that is an extension of my art practice. While accordion press has long been in development, it makes its debut in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires in January 2025. My home, along with my parents’ home, were lost in the Eaton fire. This experience has prompted me to create our first official release in support of artists affected by the disaster.

The inaugural edition of altadena, was created earlier this year to support the Alta/Pas Quilt Circle, a branch of the African American Quilters of Los Angeles guild. Several members were displaced by the fire, including my mother. As I reflect on the depth of my practice and the intentional integration of various art forms and materials, I am deeply grateful for the rich quilting legacy passed down through my mother’s artistry and the Alta/Pas Quilt Circle community. I feel it is essential to honor these women by showcasing their work and producing a limited-edition print to raise funds, ensuring they have the resources to continue their practice. Proceeds have gone to the group to provide the resources to continue their practice as an important part of our creative community.

Accordion press will also be the home for all my editions, including handmade artist books, prints and objects, available here, and will also highlight collaborations with other artists and workshops.

The Lapis Press Presents Two New Print Editions by Kenturah Davis

duration I (jada), 2024. archival pigment print mounted to 3D lenticular lens in walnut frame. 19.25 x 26.75 x 4 in. framed. edition of 10.

duration I (jada), 2024. (animated gif)

tangents (jada - marjani - marcella), 2024, archival pigment print on paper, 20 x 30 inches (unframed), edition of 40

In partnership with The Lapis Press, Kenturah Davis is proud to present two new photographic limited editions. For inquiries please contact The Lapis Press.

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Press Release:

Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you…There is something underneath that is incomplete.

-Toni Morrison and Nellie McKay. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” in Contemporary Literature

There's this thing about movement, obviously, yes: the sleight of the hand, of the shadow, slight reflection, some refraction, that place, that face, that knowing. Kenturah Davis is a master of this transition, shifting scope and focus in a single shot, commanding both viewer and subject into an ethereal fourth-dimensional space. With her lenticular print duration I (jada), 2024, and pigment print tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), 2024, Davis extends time through her compulsion to gather at the seams of movement locating a nearly intangible, unbound subject. Akin to jazz’s spontaneity and place on the edge, Davis’s photographs find focus in the instability and chatter that improvisation—be it light, aperture, or matter—offers in each moment. A single subject echos into infinite portals with duration I (jada) while in tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), the three women's bodies and physical space extend into diverging rays of light. Here, intent and chance play within the frame, while also highlighting the precipice of something just beyond the boundaries.

In the above epigraph, Toni Morrison looks to the profound innovation within the unknowing, what she names the underneath, that jazz offers in tone, pace, and illegibility. Davis, an artist committed to the utility/shadow/structure of language as a technology within her broad artistic practice, also finds herself within the realm of jazz’s underneath, blurring and collapsing edges of perception. In these two prints, language is the gesture relaying and creating a looking that is home in the incomplete.

Artist Statement:

The invitation from The Lapis Press to collaborate turned into a fulfilling lesson in walking in the dark…we felt our way through two years of r&d to emerge with two works that recalibrate the act of seeing. They portray the subtle, improvised movements among dancers to highlight the potent possibilities of our quotidian encounters. Creating a body of long exposure photographs that could be integrated into the sophisticated lenticular technology that The Lapis Press has developed proved to be an interesting challenge. Introducing a mirror into the scene of duration I - (jada) extended the experience of space and time as the subject’s gaze shifts across the frame. Ultimately, it delivers the illusive magic of lenticular images with a sense of ephemeral multiplicity.

tangents (jada - marjani - marcella), an archival pigment print on paper, foregrounds an anomaly of lights streaking around three figures. Even as they appear to be in a state of pause, the image proposes that nothing is static and every aspect of our reality is a dynamic orchestration of movement.

This new collaboration with The Lapis Press forms a bridge between photography and my extensive drawing practice. It highlights the significant role photography plays in my efforts to create images and objects that ask for slow looking and thoughtful reflection about how we perceive ourselves in the world.  - Kenturah Davis

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - clouds

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Opens Friday, May 31, 6:00 - 8:00 pm,

Walkthrough with Dr. Zoé Whitley, 6:00 - 6:30pm

5-6 Cork St. London W1S 3LQ

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present clouds, Kenturah Davis’ debut solo exhibition in the UK. The drawing series that comprise this show are united by a common text—an essay penned by Davis that explores perception as an expressive and existential state. The artist’s writing flows through themes of dance, African diaspora, musical notation, literature, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and theoretical physics, invoking the guiding voices of the choreographer Katherine Dunham, composer Florence B. Price, theorist Saidiya Hartman, author Toni Morrison, and physicist Carlo Rovelli. Each of Davis’ bodies of work is a study in movement that translates photographs taken by the artist. Though composed on a flat page, Davis recognises her drawings as dimensional vessels, planes where she charts, layers, and reimagines significance.

Two of Davis’ series are portrait-based: the first, grouped drawings of figures in various postures. During photo shoots for these studies, the artist invited Black women to come to her studio and improvise movement, capturing their gestures with long exposure photographs resulting in kinetic, unbound physiques. Drawing closer to the work, portions of Davis’ essay emerge, detailing the extraordinary careers of Katherine Dunham and Florence B. Price, two trailblazing Black creatives of the twentieth century who used art to pursue individual and societal metamorphosis. As a choreographer, Dunham infused dance with her background in anthropology, using her body as a vehicle to express radical ideas about space, time, and diaspora. As the first Black female musician to compose for a national symphony orchestra, Price arranged music to navigate states of instability, transition, and freedom—such as in her rediscovered piece Clouds.

Davis’ second portrait series features single drawings of figures framed with recessed mantles that display vessels of various proportions. Designed by the artist and carved by her partner, each of these sculptures was crafted from one of two types of wood: ebony from Ghana, where the artist lived for many years, and ash from Los Angeles, sourced from a tree at her home. These multimedia works can be likened to her series Text(tiles), multi-panel artworks that juxtapose portraits with woven fabrics, underscoring the etymological root of text from the Latin word “to weave.” Inserting a physical vessel into the image plane, she encourages her audience to comprehend thateach dimension of the work has the capacity to hold meaning—literally and figuratively.

The third series is a group of twelve drawings based on Davis’ snapshots of clouds. Building on the cloud as a symbolic muse for choreography and composition, she considers the natural formation through the lens of quantum physics. As a billowing mass made up of atomic particles, a cloud shifts between states of being solid, liquid, and gas—an element that fluctuates between the micro and macro. Drawing from Rovelli’s writings on the relativity of time, Davis’ compositions encourage her audience to question systems of artistry, science, philosophy, history, race, and gender for which meaning is assigned, not inherent. Welcoming shifting observations and evolving thoughts, her text and image reject an explicit reading.

For each work, Davis arranges the text in a new formation to highlight different passages, incising the sculptural passages into a polymer plate, then embossing them onto paper with an etching press. She scores each parchment with a grid - rendering the photograph section by section - using sharpened carbon pencils for portrait works and powdered indigo pigments for cloud works. With an exacting and meticulous hand, she creates a surface that resembles an ancient rubbing, emphasising how light and dark shadows reveal - rather than conceal - essential ideas within her essay. Through the blurred focus of the body, the soft edges of the cloud, and the swelling surface of the vessel, Davis balances the rigid with the fluid; the frame and grid for each serve as structured systems wherein physical and meteorological bodies roam freely.

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On Friday 31 May, Kenturah Davis and art historian and curator Dr. Zoé Whitley will lead a walkthrough of clouds, Davis’ debut solo exhibition in the UK. The drawing series that comprise this show are united by a common text—an essay penned by Davis that explores perception as an expressive and existential state. The artist’s writing flows through themes of dance, African diaspora, musical notation, literature, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and theoretical physics.

⁠Taking place from Friday 31 May – Sunday 2 June, we are extending our opening hours:

Friday 31 May, 11am–6pm, with a special opening event 6pm–8pm
Saturday 1 June, 11am–6pm
Sunday 2 June, 12–5pm

Dr. Zoé Whitley is Director of the non-profit Chisenhale Gallery in London. She co-curated the acclaimed Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power and its subsequent international tour (2017-2020). Whitley has distinguished herself working in UK institutions on exhibitions, research and collections (as curator of the British Council's 2019 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; 2014-2019 Tate Modern; 2013-2015 Tate Britain; 2003-2013 V&A). She writes for all reading ages including children's titles Meet the Artist: Frank Bowling; Meet the Artist: Sophie Taeuber-Arp; and serving as consultant for the award-winning Black Artists Shaping the World (Thames & Hudson). She is a Trustee of the Teiger Foundation and is a member of the London Mayor's Commission on Diversity in the Public Realm. She is the editor of Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! (Akira, 2024). 

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Text courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery. Video by Dan Finlayson.

Gallery 1957 Accra - In and Out of Time

IN AND OUT OF TIME, CURATED BY EKOW ESHUN

THIRD FLOOR, GALLERIA MALL, ACCRA

16 SEP - 12 DEC 2023

Drawing from the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa - to return to the past in order to move forward - the exhibition explores African cultural notions of non-linear time and brings together both established and emerging contemporary artists from across Africa and the diaspora. The exhibition gathers new artworks from a range of mediums, including painting, collage and moving image. The show introduces artists who are new to Gallery 1957’s roster, such as Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Shiraz Bayjoo, Kenturah Davis, Todd Gray, Eric Gyamfi, Lyle Ashton Harris, Julianknxx, Zanele Muholi and Emma Prempeh, as well as returning artists Gideon Appah, Amoako Boafo, Kwesi Botchway, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Tiffanie Delune, Godfried Donkor, Priscilla Kennedy, Yaw Owusu, and Arthur Timothy.

Gallery 1957 presents the exhibition in a large scale, industrial space of 1,400 square metres that amplifies the exhibition’s narrative and invites the artists to create unique works in strong dialogue with the scale of the space.

Interrogating concepts of time, African diasporic identities and collective memory, the works on show question linear narratives of progress and modernity which have historically categorised people of African origin as less developed than citizens of the West. Instead, the works on show draw on African cultural notions of non-linear time as well as the concept of circular time presented by American scholar Michelle Wright, who takes inspiration from quantum physics to re envision time as a circle, offering it “as a place of black possibility, where past, present, collective memory and speculative future merge into one.”

National Portrait Gallery - In Conversation with Kenturah Davis

In partnership with Arion Press, the historic San Francisco letterpress printer, the National Portrait Gallery is proud to present a public conversation with visionary artist Kenturah Davis. In 2023, Arion conceived and produced a new limited edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” as an artist book featuring works by Davis. 

Join us for a talk led by Rhea Combs, director of curatorial affairs, about Davis’s signature style of “text drawings.” Two recent projects exemplify the ways she fuses the acts of writing and drawing: her portraits of Janie Crawford for Arion’s edition of “Their Eyes Were Watching God”and her acclaimed portrait of Ava DuVernay, now on view in the museum’s“Portrait of a Nation” exhibition. Discover how Davis marks cultural histories by inscribing text and language onto her intricately layered portraits, all while investigating Black identity.

More information available here.

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Sun Sep 17, 2023 2:00pm - 3:00pm

McEvoy Auditorium - Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

Click here for ticket availability.

Columbus Museum of Art - Current and Upcoming Exhibitions

Works on view in one current and one upcoming show at the Columbus Museum of Art:

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PRESENT ’23: Building the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art

On view 6/8/23 - 10/8/23, Upper Level Walter Wing

PRESENT ’23 unveils the second wave of promised gifts comprising the Columbus Museum of Art’s Scantland Collection, generously donated by the Scantland Family. Featuring 33 individual works by a total of 32 artists, the evocative paintings and textiles in the exhibition showcase the vitality and stylistic range of contemporary art practice.

The Scantland Collection is one of the most dynamic private collections of contemporary visual art in North America. The Scantland Collection is comprised of works that provide a broad perspective on the creative energies of this moment and seeks to form an evolving and wide-ranging picture of art in the mid-21st century. With a growing list of gifts to the Columbus Museum of Art, the Scantland Family ensures that its ambitious program to collect the art of the present will remain part of its community for generations to come.

The Columbus Museum of Art’s renowned collection of modern painting is largely comprised of once-private collections of contemporary art. Gifted in 1931, the Ferdinand Howald Collection became a cornerstone of the Museum. CMA went on to acquire the Sirak Collection of Impressionism and European Modernism, the Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art, 1930–1970 and a major collection of the New York Photo League. Extending the Schiller Collection’s commitment to the relationship between art and society, the Scantland Collection is quickly becoming the next significant pillar of the Museum’s permanent collection.

As throughout the exhibition, these works engage historical forms and narratives as a way of acting upon and being alive to the present moment. As part of the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, these works will continue to generate excitement, reflection and creative response.

Artists include: Hayley Barker, Raphaël Barontini, Gabriella Boyd, Kenturah Davis, Angela Dufresne, Veronica Fernandez, Sayre Gomez, Asif Hoque, Devin B. Johnson, Heather Jones, Tidawhitney Lek, Amy Lincoln, Kat Lyons, Kylie Manning, Danielle McKinney, Jaime Muñoz, Robert Nava, Patrick Quarm, Lauren Quin, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Kenny Rivero, Lauren Satlowski, Marina Perez Simão, Sarah Slappey, Emma Webster, Blair Whiteford, Nicole Wittenberg, Mikey Yates, Oscar yi Hou, Guimi You, Yuri Yuan and Yesiyu Zhao.

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Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community

On view 10/6/23 –1/28/24, Lower Level Walter Wing

Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community showcases the work of 19 artists who have deep connections to Accra, Ghana and their impact on global art discourse. Over the past five years the ‘Ghana School’ has emerged as an influential group of artists who have reshaped the contemporary art landscape. The exhibition features 28 works by artists such as Amoako Boafo, Gideon Appah, Zohra Opoku, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Kenturah Davis and Derek Fordjour. Portraits, abstraction, textiles, works on papers and sculpture explore cultural identities, political histories, mythology, trauma and healing. The works challenge and redefine traditional art historical narratives, inviting viewers to engage with a new perspective.

Arion Press - Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

We are honored to present a collaboration with Arion Press in a limited edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The volume is available in a fine press or deluxe addition, with 10 additional original embossed prints available separately. More information on purchasing and production details can be found at Arion Press.

A novel by Zora Neale Hurston
With artwork by Kenturah Davis
And an introduction by Emily Bernard

Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God was largely neglected at the time of its original publication in 1937 until Alice Walker’s recovery of Hurston in the 1970s catapulted the book into its rightful place in the pantheon of American letters. Recognized now as an indispensable part of the American canon, Hurston’s story of Janie Crawford is both a poignant literary portrait of black womanhood and a rigorous anthropological account of African-American life in the interwar South.

Arion’s edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God is animated by the distinctive style of Kenturah Davis’s drawing. Davis created “text drawings” that fuse language and image by writing and rewriting meaningful phrases from Hurston’s prose to build up textured portraits of Janie Crawford at different stages in her life. In addition, Davis has selected salient excerpts from Hurston’s text which appear as intimate commentary along the bottom of every page. This continuously running line—printed from over 100 plates reproducing Davis’s hand-written manuscript—flows from the first page to the last as a surrogate heartbeat for the novel.

50 embossed prints with chine collé, numbered and signed by the artist Kenturah Davis, are available for sale: 40 accompany the Deluxe edition and 10 are offered individually. “Here Was Peace” features a color photograph portrait of Janie Crawford’s character set beside a striking, blind-embossed passage from the closing lines of Hurston’s novel. These unique prints measure 12 x 14½ inches and are printed on heavyweight 300 gsm textured all-cotton Somerset, suitable for framing.