Kenturah Davis

however artistically the sky expresses itself, the clouds are an account of a regiment of thermodynamics, microphysics, and patterns of air motion. to say, i’m as free as a cloud, is to say that i may take many forms within the confines of the conditions i find myself in. the clouds’ enduring cycle of rising and falling analogizes the breadth of human experience: a float, a fall, a dance, a death. 

—Kenturah Davis, “the architecture of clouds” (2026) 

In the correlation between truth and time, Kenturah Davis expands her conception of the “planar vessel.” These works on paper are dimensional fields where printing plates engraved with ancient symbols, personal writing, musical scores, theoretical physics, spartan sketches, and literary prose are debossed into panels of gridded paper in perpetually shifting combinations. Each time a plate alters position, so too does the reference’s significance. Across every landscape and portrait-layered plane, Davis charts an intricate and amorphous matrix of contingency: knowledge or truth that is relative to the perspective it is observed from, the language used to describe it, and the context influencing its adaptation. Oscillating between, and orbiting above, the prescribed “point A to point B,” Davis compels us to consider the myriad ways that humans organize and unravel information in order to shape or disrupt meaning: how stars are formed into constellations or how land is drafted into maps; how words diffuse into sound or how matter burns into ash. 

Since 2024, Davis has superimposed her debossed references with sketched and sponged clouds drawn from her own photographs. While in the first iteration of the series she depicted various skies with deep indigo pigments, in the aftermath of the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena—during which the artist and her parents both lost their homes—in this show, Davis depicts a single, sprawling cloud from her native city’s sky composed with rich black pigments. Her nebulous formations echo with the billowing haze of the Eaton Fire, each stroke shaded with confounding chronologies, from the artist’s memory to municipal reports and weather patterns. For Davis, clouds articulate a physical and psychic atomizing. A droplet condenses into a cumulus mass. An artifact reveals a complex history. A legend deciphers an unknown language. Uncovered truths, like the wind, are susceptible to change the course of all things—to multiply rather than solidify reality. 

In each percolation, illustration, meditation, and quotation scrawled across her planar vessels, Davis savors the symmetries that multiplicity unveils. Topographies are expressed through weaving streets on an antique map of Altadena; light years measuring the distance from the sun to the earth; grooves crackling the surface of a full moon. Symbols are culled from Egyptian hieroglyphs and African adinkra, reliefs in the Temple of Hatshepsut, and engravings on the Rosetta Stone. Relativity is comprehended through author Zora Neale Hurston’s assertion that one must “know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life,” with equal importance to physicist Carlo Rovelli’s proposition that “in the world described by quantum mechanics, there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems.” Inscribing her diaristic texts in halos around citations and capsuling her roaming inquiries in floating orbs, her work serves as an atmosphere uniquely acclimatized to her imaginings. 

Of the many serendipitous discoveries Davis’ research led her to, a cherished detail came in learning that the etymological root of Kenturah means “incense.” Unfurling this revelation across her infinite plane, she took the insight as a sign to further her efforts to study some elusive gaps in the history of Sub-Saharan Africa. Realized through the emergence of an incense burner in Nubia decorated with Egyptian iconography and colonnade carvings in the temple at Deir El Bahari, it is believed that Ancient Egyptian aromatics, in fact, came through trade routes originating in the mythologized Land of Punt. Conjuring the historic use of incense to note the passage of time, Davis created a trough below a grid of cloud-marked porcelain tiles where incense was sifted into an inscription and lit so plumes of plant resins could perfume the clay—leaving behind a charred message once the smoke settled. As with wildfire destruction, as with disseminated ideas, all substance, whether actual or conceptual, can alter states and dissolve into ruins, embers, and mist. 

This metamorphic potential glows in the wobbling gestures of Davis’ portraits, where subjects are elastic with long exposure, obscured behind sliding doors, and warped across mirrored diptychs—all captured in the midst of practicing choreographer Katherine Dunham’s dance of constant motion. Whether in the textured gradation of a cloud or body, or in the silhouetted symbols for Egyptian fans, Musgum huts, and clay pots, Davis honors the safety in shade, the protection in darkness, and the way that, by virtue of her debossing process, it is only with dense mark-making that her texts can be illuminated clearly—pitch-black pigments derived from the soot of blazing oil lamps. As Toni Morrison describes in Song of Solomon, “You think dark is just one color but it ain’t…. May as well be a rainbow.” Ever smoking in her censer, Davis’ thoughts smolder over her paper planes and emanate into the nebula-crested cosmos—her gaze fixed on the North Star. 

As a complement to this new body of work, the correlation between truth and time features a display of creations from Davis’ Accordion Press: a print and design project she founded in 2025 in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire. Her first release from the press was altadena, an engraving of a historic map of the city—represented in the exhibited works—tinted with natural pigments, which was sold to support artists affected by the fire. Calling on ancient technologies and techniques, with an emphasis on sensorial, tactile objects, the project produces limited-edition photographs—made with detailed processes like Chine-collé and lenticular printing—as well as handmade incense, textiles, and ceramics. Drawing from her methodology of planar vessels, the artist named the press after the accordion book-making style, which transforms the flat page into a sculptural, dimensional object—by design, at once compact and expansive. 

Kenturah Davis (b. 1980, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist earned her BA from Occidental College and MFA from Yale School of Art.

Davis was the recipient of the 2025 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Rest Stops: An Altadena Garden Initiative by Kenturah Davis is currently on view in collaboration with Destination Crenshaw and Crenshaw Dairy Mart.

Recent solo exhibitions include Clouds, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2024); Dark Illumination, Oxy Arts, Los Angeles (2023); apropos of air, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2021); (a)Float, (a)Fall, (a)Dance, (a)Death, Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2021); and Everything That Cannot Be Known, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020).

Notable institutional exhibitions include Wordplay, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2026); Objects of Desire, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); Ode to ‘Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena, curated by Dominique Clayton, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2025); Accra! The Rise of a Global Art Community, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2023); Full Figure, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA (2023); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Portrait of a Nation: 2022 Honorees, organized by the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. (2022); California Biennial 2022, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2022); Our House: Selections from MOCA’s Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022); Black Joy, Yale University, New Haven, CT (2016); Must Risk Delight, organized in collaboration with the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and i:23: The Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2014).

The Los Angeles Metro Rail commissioned a large-scale, site-specific work by Davis that is now permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX K Line station. The artist was an inaugural artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, founded by Titus Kaphar and Jonathan Brand, and a DAMLI fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Davis was the 2022–23 Wanlass Artist in Residence at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and a member of the inaugural cohort for Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, by Theaster Gates and Prada. She was the 2024 recipient of the Sherman Family Foundation Residency at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Her work is included in the collections of Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker ArtSpace, Palm Beach, FL; CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Hudson, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Rubell Museum, Miami; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; The University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT.