Alonzo Davis, a leading African American artist, educator, and gallerist who was a tireless advocate for Black artists and social justice, has died at 82. His passing was announced by Los Angeles’s Parrasch Heijnen, his gallery since 2021. Davis is survived by his younger brother, artist Dale Brockman Davis; his partner, Kay Lindsey; his daughters, Paloma Allen-Davis and Treasure Davis, and two grandsons.

The artist was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, where his father was a professor of psychology at Tuskegee University. When Davis was 14, his parents separated, and he moved with his mother and brother to Los Angeles. There, he did his undergrad in art history at Pepperdine College, graduating in 1964, and earned both a BFA and an MFA in printmaking and design at Otis Art Institute in 1971 and ’73.

In between, Davis, then teaching art at L.A.’s Crenshaw High School, took advantage of summer break to embark upon a cross-country roadtrip with his younger brother. The two had been immersed in Black culture as children in Tuskegee, and wanted to learn more about their African heritage as adults.

“We decided to take a summer trip in ‘66 to the historically Black communities around the country,” Davis told the blog Black Art in America in 2022, recounting meeting the likes of John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden. “We [were] driving through what I would call the cornfields and the desert to get back to Los Angeles and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could open an art gallery?’”

Alonzo Davis. Alonzo Davis Collection. Photo courtesy of the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

That dream became a reality in 1967, when they opened Brockman Gallery in L.A,’s Leimert Park neighborhood. It was the first major Black-owned gallery in the U.S., and championed the work of Black artists. (The name was controversial at a time when Black nationalism was taking root in California—it came from Brockman mansion in Greenville, South Carolina, where their maternal grandmother, Della Brockman’s, father was born to a white man and an enslaved Black woman.)

“[We] learned by the seat of our pants—bookkeeping, consignment, and setting up a business account, sales and record-keeping—[we] had no formal education,” Davis told PBS.

A brochure cover for the Leimert Park Festival for the Arts (ca. 1969). Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

But despite the brothers’ complete lack of experience, the gallery became a thriving hub for African American artists, promoting the work of such now-well-known names as Elizabeth Catlett, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Samella Lewis, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Charles White. (Davis studied under White at Otis, and it was White who encouraged him to take that fateful roadtrip.)

The brothers also purchased work they showed at the gallery for their personal collection, such as Catlett’s large-scale cedar sculpture Black Unity (1968). The piece takes the form of a clenched fist on one side, and two faces resembling African masks on the reverse. (The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, purchased the work in 2014, and it was included in the artist’s Brooklyn Museum retrospective that closed earlier this month.)

A brochure cover for the Collection of Alonzo and Dale Davis showing Elizabeth Catlett’s Black Unity. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Dale Davis donated the Brockman Gallery archives to the Los Angeles Public Library in 2019, and Davis also was extensively interviewed by the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research. The artist’s personal archives went to the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland in 2022.

“Alonzo Davis was a visionary artist and cultural leader whose work helped shape the landscape of contemporary Black art for more than half a century. His unwavering commitment to supporting artists of color and expanding opportunities for creative expression leaves an enduring legacy in American art history,” Jordana Moore Saggese, director of the Driskell Center, told me. “We hope that his papers, housed in the Driskell Center Archives, provide a rich resource for future scholarship, ensuring that his influence and contributions to art history will continue to be studied and celebrated for generations to come.”

Over the years, the brothers’ gallery grew to include a nonprofit arm, Brockman Productions (founded in 1973), which ran an artist in residence program and annual film festival among other programs. Davis took a step back from the gallery in 1987 when he accepted a post as the interim director of the public art program in Sacramento, followed by an artist residency in Hawaii in 1988. The brothers closed Brockman Gallery for good in 1990. (Today, the building is home to the nonprofit exhibition space Art + Practice.)

An advertisement for Alonzo Davis’s print based on Eye on 84, his public mural for the Olympic Arts Festival ahead of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Photo courtesy of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.

Davis also worked to bring public art to the streets of Los Angeles, painting murals himself, as well as encouraging other artists to do so. In its heyday, Brockman Gallery even ran a Professional Artist Employment Program that gave unemployed artists jobs making public art.

“We were finding through the gallery that there were a lot of people who liked art, but we weren’t reaching the working class, certain segments of the middle class, and everyday people. They weren’t coming in the doors,” Davis once said, as recounted in a virtual exhibition about his public art based on his archives by University of Maryland students. “Whereas, with murals and art in public places, they were confronted with it in their everyday traffic patterns. So we tended to continue to look for public art sites where there was a lot of foot or automobile traffic.”

Artist Alonzo Davis symbolizes Los Angeles’s awakening as an international city in a trio of bright murals on a freeway wall titled Eye on ’84 as part of the Olympics Art Festival in Los Angeles in July 1984. Photo by Ben Martin/Getty Images.

It was Davis’s idea to do a mural project in Los Angeles on the occasion of the 1984 Olympics. Robert Fitzpatrick, then president of the California Institute of the Arts and director of the Olympic Arts Festival, tapped Davis to be director of the Olympic Mural Project. It featured four miles of murals by 10 artists along the Los Angeles freeway, painted in conjunction with the Caltrans transportation arts program. Davis’s contribution, Eye on ’84, is perhaps his best-known work.

Post-Brockman Gallery, Davis continued his work in art education, first teaching at the San Antonio Art Institute in 1991 and ’92. From 1993 to 2002, Davis was dean of the Memphis College of Art. (The former closed in 2023, the latter in 2020.)

In 1995, Davis received a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts through the National Endowment for the Arts. He then served on the VCCA Fellows Council from 1999 to 2003, including a stint as chair, and joined the center’s board of directors in 2004. At his suggestion, VCCA created the Alonzo Davis Fellowship in 2007, offering a fully-funded, two-week residency for African American or Latin American writers, visual artists, and composers.

 

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Since 2002, Davis has lived in Hyattsville, Maryland. In 2004, he founded A.I.R. Studio Paducah, an artist residency program in Paducah, Kentucky. In 2008, through New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery, Davis did a residency at the Tang Xian Art Center in Beijing, where Amy Sherald assisted in his studio.

Davis was a mixed media artist, sometimes even working with dancers and musicians to bring his vision to life. His work with Brockman Gallery kept Davis from being fully devoted to his studio practice, and in his later years he was happy to rededicate himself to it without “having the chain of the gallery holding me down,” he told PBS.

On his website in his artist statement, Davis wrote of drawing his inspiration from travel: “I seek influences, cultural centers, energies, new terrain, and the power of both the spoken and unspoken. The magic of the Southwest United States, Brazil, Haiti, and West Africa has penetrated my work.”

Alonzo Davis. Photo courtesy of the Alonzo Davis studio.

“Davis’ works are a reclamation of identity, using Blackness, Egyptian imagery, African imagery, and Indigenous motifs. Textiles and found ephemera embrace a utilitarian approach to material, highlighting Black history within the United States. Sewn together and bound in multiple facets, Davis projected a winding narrative of identity and meaning. As his work suggests, it was and continued to be a subversive act to believe in oneself,” the gallery said in a statement. “It has been a tremendous honor to work with such a visionary, and true friend.”

Major bodies of work include his 1970s collage series “Mental Space,” made by drawing and painting on surfaces made with assorted scraps of paper such as old postcards and brown bags. In the 1980s, Davis began focusing on “The Blanket Series,” weaving together and painting strips of paper to create textured abstract works that reference quilting and Kente cloth.

Alonzo Davis with his “Power Poles.” Alonzo Davis Collection. Photo courtesy of the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The latter was the subject of his 2022 debut solo show at Parrasch Heijnen—his first in L.A. since a 1984 outing at Brockman. That same year, Davis had retrospective at the BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Maryland, featuring sculptures made in his two decades in the state, including bamboo “Power Pole” sculptures.

The artist’s contributions to the Black art scene in Los Angeles were recognized in “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The show was among the most high-profile shows in the Getty’s first “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition series “Art in L.A. 1945–1980” in 2011, and traveled to MoMA PS1 in New York and Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Earlier in his career, Davis had a solo show at the storied Just Above Midtown Gallery in New York in 1975. More recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, included Davis in the 2022 to 2023 show “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–80s.”