Alonzo Davis (1942–2025)

Alonzo Davis (1942–2025)

Artist and academic Alonzo Davis, who with his brother Dale Brockman Davis cofounded Brockman Gallery, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Black art scene in the 1960s and ’70s, died on January 27 in Largo, Maryland, at the age of eighty-two. Beginning his career in a time when largely only white artists were able to gain notice, Davis became a lifelong advocate for Black artists and Black art, through his gallery elevating the work of Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Dan Concholar, Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, John Outterbridge, and Charles White, among others. Davis in his own work, inspired by travel to Africa, the Caribbean, and the American Southwest, and by Pacific Rim cultures, explored many forms but is perhaps best known for his murals of the ’70s and ’80s. The most famous of these is hisEye on ’84, an arresting, symbol-studded work gracing a two-hundred-foot-long span of LA’s downtown Harbor Freeway.

Alonzo Davis was born on February 2, 1942, in Tuskegee, Alabama. His father taught psychology, and his mother was a librarian. The Davis family moved to California while he was still a teenager, and Davis earned a degree in art education from Pepperdine University and spent several years teaching high school art while continuing to create his own work, concentrating on assemblage. Los Angeles in the mid-1960s was home to many Black artists. Even as the civil rights movement was taking hold across the country, they found themselves unable to attain the press or gallery representation that their white counterparts enjoyed. Following the Watts Rebellion of 1965, the LA art scene crackled with political energy, and in 1967, Davis and his brother returned from a transformative road trip and inaugurated Brockman Gallery in the city’s Leinert Park neighborhood. “We filled a gap and a void there,” Davis said in the 2006 filmLeimert Park: The Story of a Village in South Central Los Angeles, directed by Jeannette Lindsay. “We just opened a window that had never been available, especially on the West Coast.” Named for their maternal grandmother, the gallery was unique at the time in its status as a commercial, rather than solely a community, space and has since been credited with catalyzing the cultural milieu around it, as Black artists moved to the area to live and work. Collaborating with other galleries and museums, including LA’s California Afro-American Museum and New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, Davis worked tirelessly to bring in fresh talent, both domestic and international, working to obtain loans and to secure visas in order to bring attention to the artists he felt were deserving.

In 1970, Davis enrolled in the Otis Art Institute’s MFA program, with the goal of creating art that was a “projection . . . of and for the future of mankind and black peoples.” While there, he studied printmaking and design and encountered Charles White, who was then teaching there. At White’s urging, he began making works in series, beginning what would become an enduring practice. In 1973 Davis and his brother launched Brockman Productions, a nonprofit initiative that partnered with other organizations to bring art festivals, concerts, and educational programs to the area. Around this time, too, fell in with the California mural movement, painting works on walls around Los Angeles. In 1983, he was commissioned to create one of ten murals to be painted on LA’s Harbor Freeway in advance of the 1984 Summer Olympics the city was hosting, giving rise to his noted Eye on ’84, which appeared to those driving by it a series of trompe l’oeil canvases draped over the freeway wall.

Davis throughout the ’80s continued to work in forms including assemblage and collage. In 1987, he left his role at the gallery—which would remain open another three years—and moved to Sacramento to oversee a state arts program. “Part of leaving Los Angeles and relocating to Sacramento was trying to find my identity as an artist and move from other artists pulling at me, wanting more of my time and resources for community-oriented programs — [as an artist] I wanted to do my own thing. The community was so hard and expectations were so great and you were only seen in one direction and not as a multi-directional person — it just wasn’t working.” Following 1988 residency in Hawaii and a 1991–92 stint at the San Antonio Art Institute, he took up the post of dean of the Memphis College of Art, which he held from 1993 to 2002. He moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, in the early 2000s, where he continued his practice, which incorporated materials including bamboo, wood, paper, and LEDs, as well as layered color and burned-in patterns, in works addressing issues such as social justice and climate change. In the past few years, he was included in the landmark traveling surveys “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980” and “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” and was the subject of “NOMAD: The Art of Alonzo Davis” at the Rachel Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center in Alexandria, Virginia.Asked in a 2021 oral history interview for the Getty Trust about the historicizing of his oeuvre, Davis appeared to brush aside concerns regarding his legacy. “I leave that to the historians,” he said. “I just need to make art.”