How the Family-Run Underground Museum Became One of L.A.’s Most Vital Cultural Forces
The night after the 2016 U.S. presidential election,MoonlightdirectorBarry Jenkinsmade his way to the Underground Museum, a buzzy cultural hub and alternative art space in the predominantly black-and-Latino neighborhood of Arlington Heights, in Central Los Angeles. Walking into the small storefront space for a post-screening Q&A, he saw few viewers inside and assumed that distress over the previous night’s outcome had made everyone stay home. Then he stepped outside into the garden and found 250 people packed tightly together on blankets on the lawn. They had just watchedMoonlighton the outdoor screen and were eager to talk—not about craft or behind-the-scenes stuff, as they typically did at Jenkins’s Q&A’s, he says, but about how they felt. Jenkins recalls it as the most meaningful night of the movie’s rollout.
“I was struck by what a diverse crowd it was—tons of black folks, people from the neighborhood, white, Latino, Asian. And I thought, This is America,” says the director, whose film went on to win the Oscar for best picture. “Nothing could replicate the feeling that we had that night. It was almost like group therapy, all of us just out there under the stars, witnessing this thing we’d made and using it to bring us together.”
Cofounded in 2012 by the painter Noah Davis, a rising L.A. art star, and his wife, Karon, a sculptor, the Underground Museum began as a row of storefront spaces that doubled as the couple’s studio and home. Though the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York, and the Rubell Family Collection, in Miami, had acquired some of Davis’s moody figurative paintings, Davis wanted to sidestep the gallery system, preferring to bring museum-quality art to a community that had no access to it “within walking distance,” as he once put it.
Soon, he and Karon were opening their doors to anyone passing by, and Noah was curating eclectic shows—of his own work and of others’, including his older brother, Kahlil Joseph, an artist and filmmaker who created music videos and would go on to direct videos for Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé. Noah was 32 when he died of a rare type of soft tissue cancer, in 2015; by then he had forged a unique partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which had agreed to loan the Underground Museum works from its permanent collection for a series of shows that Davis would curate. (He was able to work on the first one, and left behind plans for 18 others.)
Learn more at WMagazine.com