Online Exhibition

Noah Davis: New Editions

Interested in artworks?

Register for first access to two limited edition screenprints created in collaboration with the Estate of Noah Davis to benefit the host museums on the occasion of the artist’s acclaimed retrospective. The works, based on two important paintings included in the exhibition, are printed in editions of 50 and estate stamped.

Profits from the sale of these editions will benefit the Hammer Museum, the Barbican, and the Philadelphia Art Museum.

40 Acres and a Unicorn is based on the important early painting of the same title, which refers to the decree made in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War promising that enslaved people would be given “40 acres and a mule.” The decree was short-lived—following Abraham Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, his successor Andrew Johnson repealed the order, and the phrase subsequently became associated with the failure of Reconstruction.

Noah Davis, 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2026 (detail)

"Out of the blackness of creation appears a mythological animal. If the fantasy of the unicorn replaces a beast of burden, then the endless space-time continuum of the universe replaces the 40 acres. A phantom, a man, a child holds the reins of a future perpetually deferred, a future not contained in the space of the picture. Delicately rendered in this diminutive canvas, the figure and the unicorn are headed straight towards us."

— Helen Molesworth, curator

Noah Davis, Mary Jane, 2026 (detail)

In his paintings, Davis often combined elements of nostalgia and surrealism to evoke a world that is both intimate and strange. In Mary Jane, a young girl wearing the titular shoe stands with her hands clasped in front of a background of abstracted black and green swirls that coalesce into a hedge. Her plaintive gaze and prim appearance suggest a latent narrative.

Here, the painted image is translated into a hand-pulled screenprint in fifty colors. As critic Helen Molesworth has noted, Davis “had a knack for establishing three-dimensional space while remaining highly attuned to the flatness of the canvas.” The artist’s unique attention to surface and painterly gesture is faithfully preserved in the edition through the meticulous layering of washes.

Noah Davis, Mary Jane, 2026 (detail)

American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015) created a distinctive body of paintings that effortlessly synthesizes a wide range of reference points, pivoting between scenes of everyday life and surreal derivations thereof. The final leg of a traveling retrospective of Davis's work recently opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will remain open until April 26, 2026.  More information about Noah Davis can be found here.

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