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 his Eye 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 film Leimert 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…