REST STOPS, presented by Crenshaw Dairy Mart and Destination Crenshaw

Kenturah Davis and her studio, Accordion Press, are pleased to announce Rest Stops, a post-wildfire garden initiative developed in response to the loss of her family homes in the 2025 Eaton Fire. Inspired by Black quilting traditions, the project stitches together a network of green spaces designed to heal both land and community. Rest Stops coordinates a network of intimate, sensory gardens throughout Altadena, California—creating spaces for rest, reflection, ecological renewal, and community connection.

With the goal of installing ten gardens by 2028, Rest Stops aims to help safeguard belonging, continuity, and rootedness by partnering with property owners in collaboration with landscape architect, Sarita Jaccard, to install new green spaces of native and edible plants, including species known for detoxifying soils and supporting local wildlife-creating landscapes that are both fire-resilient and restorative. Each garden will be scaled so that the layout won’t impede future construction. Our partnership with Angel City Reciprocity will provide Altadena lumber to create some of the seating using trees felled post-fire.

We invite Altadena families who have lost their home in the fires to consider receiving a garden. Please fill out an interest form for a garden by December 31st, 2026 here. If you want to get involved by supporting the project, please make a donation here, or fill out a volunteer form here.

To learn more about the project, we invite you to come to the exhibition at Crenshaw Dairy Mart, co-presented with Destination Crenshaw, opening Saturday, October 17th from 4pm - 7pm. It will remain on display through November 15th, with viewing hours Saturdays and Sundays from 11 am - 4pm. The exhibition will feature drawings and prototypes that reimagine public and private thresholds while exploring the relationships between land, memory, resilience, and belonging. 

Rest Stops: An Altadena Garden Initiative by Kenturah Davis is the first collaboration between Destination Crenshaw and Crenshaw Dairy Mart highlighting the shared commitment to uplifting Black artists and strengthening Black- and POC-led arts and culture organizations across Los Angeles. Destination Crenshaw’s mission is to preserve, anchor, and celebrate the culture and creative leadership of Black Los Angeles while creating pathways for long-term economic and cultural ownership in South LA. Through alliances such as its partnership with CDM, Destination Crenshaw is working toward a future in which Black artists and culturally rooted institutions have the resources, relationships, and infrastructure necessary to thrive while shaping the future of arts and culture in Los Angeles.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Teiger Foundation, Creative Capital and Destination Crenshaw. Fellowships awarded to the artist from The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens and the Center for Art and Abolition further the research and development of the project. This endeavor would not be possible without the support of our donors and the following team of collaborators:

• Angel City Reciprocity, Lumber Mill

• Sarita Jaccard, Landscape Architect and Designer

• Scrub Jay Studio, Landscape Advisor

• Fernando Diaz, Woodworker

• Rebecca Latta, Arborist

• Eraka Bath, Professor, Assistant Dean Department of Psychiatry at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine

• Headlands Center for the Arts, Fiscal Sponsor

• Evan Chambers, Glass Artist

• Community Compound, Community Organizer

• HRDWRKER, Videographer

• Chris Wawrinofsky, Metal Worker

• Mildred Davis, Quilter

• Tresell Davis, Project Manager

Exhibition Opening at Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Saturday, October 17, 2026, 4-7pm

Gallery Hours, Saturdays and Sundays 11am - 4pm, October 17 - November 15th

8629 Crenshaw Blvd

Inglewood, CA 90305

Creative Capital - 2026 Awardee

Kenturah Davis is the recipient of the 2026 Creative Capital Award for the creation of a new visual arts project titled “Rest Stops: Thriving in the Thresholds of Altadena.” This project will breath life into the recovery of Altadena through an artistic garden initiative. The project welcomes ten families affected by the Eaton wildfires into a partnership in which native plants, shade and artfully designed seating are installed at the edge of barren plots of land. Rest Stops uses art and ecology to restore connection between neighbors, land, and wildlife. The fall 2026 exhibition at Crenshaw Dairy Mart will publicly debut the project with an exhibition of prototypes and drawings.

Friday, January 9, 2025 (New York, NY)—Creative Capital, the nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression by supporting individual artists across the United States, announced that it will award $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists residing in all 50 states and territories. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has provided $55 million in grants and services to 1,119 artists across the country.

For the first time in Creative Capital’s 25-year history, the inaugural State of the Art Prize will provide a $10,000 unrestricted grant to 53 individual artists, one in every state, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. With this new grant, Creative Capital extends its democratic, national, open call to serve more artists at the grassroots level and to foster creativity and innovation in a broad range of rural, regional, and urban communities.

The 2026 Creative Capital Award, renowned for its recognition of original, ambitious project proposals for new artistic ideas, will support the creation of 49 new works in visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, and literature, as well as technology, multidisciplinary, and socially engaged forms in all disciplines. The Creative Capital Award supports the creation of risk-taking, groundbreaking new works by providing the awarded artist up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, plus professional development services and community-building opportunities.

“Creative Capital remains unwavering in our mission to support individual artists creating new work as a powerful catalyst for freedom of thought and freedom of expression in our democracy. In this moment of urgent and widespread need for arts funding, generous supporters have helped Creative Capital expand our open call, national grant program to serve innovative artists in all 50 states. This will be the first year Creative Capital is supporting artists in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”— Christine Kuan, President & Executive Director, Creative Capital 

The artists receiving the 2026 Creative Capital Award and 2026 State of the Art Prize were selected from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States via a democratic, national open call. Project proposals were evaluated through an external review process that included 107 industry leaders, programmers, cultural producers, and artists, and culminated in discipline-specific final panels.

“The 2026 Creative Capital Awarded projects boldly push artistic form and ideas forward, from an Arabic-language jazz opera; to a family-owned grocery store transformed into a community space in gentrifying Washington, D.C., to a film meditation on the color blue.”  Angela Mattox, Director of Artist Initiatives, Creative Capital 

These ambitious new works explore a range of topics including: state violence, democracy, poverty, the fentanyl/opioid crisis, consumerism, autism, healthcare, labor, conservation, dementia, ageism, patriarchy, the Altadena fires, gentrification, family, nightlife, deafness, sex, color theory, bull-fighting, urbanism, religion, famine, and war. The complete list of recipients of the 2026 Inaugural State of the Art Prize and 2026 Creative Capital Award are listed below.

Art + Practice - Giving you the best that I got

planar vessel XXX (marcella), 2024.

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From Art + Practice (Los Angeles):

Giving you the best that I got highlights images and narratives of Black mothers, from pregnancy to the forever journey of what it means to be a mother. The sacred relationship between mother and child has shaped many artistic expressions throughout history, yet the nuanced experiences and attitudes around Black mothers in contemporary art remains underdocumented. This exhibition features not only artists who make work that intentionally foregrounds Black women and matrilineal histories, it also includes others whose work shows an appreciation for them through themes of nostalgia, care, and cultural inheritance.

Giving you the best that I got is curated by Dominique Clayton, independent curator and founder of Dominique Gallery, and is co-presented by the California African American Museum and Art + Practice as part of CAAM at A+P, a five-year collaboration.

Participating artists for the exhibition include: Derrick Adams, Kwame Brathwaite, Bisa Butler, Karon Davis, Kenturah Davis, Lanise Howard, February James, Ashley January, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Jill Knox, Lex Marie, Helina Metaferia, Calida Rawles, Harmonia Rosales, Jamel Shabazz, Ferrari Sheppard, Shefon N. Taylor, Sydney Vernon, Ciarra K. Walters and Carrie Mae Weems.

In collaboration with the California African American Museum.

October 11, 2025 - March 7, 2026

3401 W. 43rd Place, Los Angeles, CA 90008

Install view of Giving you the best that I got, Art + Practice Los Angeles. Photo Credit Charles White/JW Pictures.

Studio Museum in Harlem - Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize

From the Studio Museum in Harlem:

On behalf of the Board of Trustees, the staff of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Joyce and George Wein Foundation, we are pleased to present Kenturah Davis as this year's Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize recipient.

The Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize was established in 2006 by jazz impresario, musician, and philanthropist George Wein (1925-2021), in memory of his wife Joyce (1928-2005), a dedicated Trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize honors the legacy of a woman whose life embodied a commitment to the power and possibilities of art and culture.

Throughout her life, Joyce was deeply involved with philanthropy and the arts. Together, Joyce and George created a brilliant collection of African American art dating from the 1920s to the 1990, which was shown publicly for the first time at Boston University Art Gallery (George’s alma mater) just a few months after Joyce’s passing. Journalist Ed Bradley noted in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition that to his friends Joyce and George, “collecting art was like collecting knowledge.” But the arts were far from the only beneficiaries of Joyce’s generosity: she and George established the Joyce and George Wein Chair in African American Studies at Boston University. The Alexander Family Endowed Scholarship Fund at Simmons College, from which Joyce graduated as a chemistry major, was soon to follow. Joyce was also a founder of the New York Coalition of 100 Black Women.

In keeping with Joyce’s support for living artists, the Joyce Alexander Wein Prize recognizes the artistic achievements of a Black artist who demonstrates great innovation, promise, and creativity.

Over the last 19 years the prize has been awarded to a distinguished group of artists:

2024 Toyin Ojih Odutola

2023 Cy Gavin

2022 Robert A. Pruitt

2021 Caroline Kent

2020 Cauleen Smith

2019 Torkwase Dyson

2018 Diedrick Brackens

2017 Simone Leigh

2016 Derrick Adams

2015 Njideka Akunyili Crosby

2014 Samuel Levi Jones

2013 Gary Simmons

2012 Jennie C. Jones

2011 Leonardo Drew

2010 Leslie Hewitt

2009 Glenn Ligon

2008 Nadine Robinson

2007 Trenton Doyle Hancock

2006 Lorna Simpson

The award was announced during the program of the annual Studio Museum gala, on Monday, October 27th 2025 in New York City, in advance of the grand opening of the new Studio Museum building, designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson.

Sidecar Gallery - From Common Ground, presented by Fondation Valmont

Courtesy of Sidecar Gallery:

Sidecar Gallery is delighted to present From Common Ground, a group exhibition featuring work by Los Angeles area artists Sarah Awad, Marwa Abdul-Rahman, Mira Dancy, Kenturah Davis, Brad Eberhard, Asher Hartman, Alice Könitz, Ruby Neri, Laura Howard Parker, Camilla Taylor, Patricia Valencia, Emmett Walsh, and Eric Zammitt. From Common Ground will be on view from July 12 - August 23, 2025 at Sidecar Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. There will be an opening reception from 6-8pm on July 12, including a performance by Marcos Lutyens.

The works by artists in From Common Ground engage with a robust variety of themes ranging from tensions between figuration and abstraction in painting, to land use and water rights in the American Southwest, and ideas about the collective and individual human experiences in the natural world.

This exhibition is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Fondation Valmont through its mission to promote contemporary art, foster intercultural dialogues, and support visual artists on a global scale.

From Common Ground is curated by Salim Moore, academic curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, and brings together a creative exchange of work by artists with roots in Altadena, California. The artists were assembled through a collaboration between the Fondation Valmont, Marcos Lutyens, and Night Gallery

California African American Museum - Ode to ‘Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena

From the California African American Museum:

April 15 - October 12, 2025

curated by: Dominique Clayton, independent curator

In January 2025, wildfires erupted in Los Angeles, ripping through residential neighborhoods on both the west and east sides of the county. On the west side, the Palisades Fire consumed the oceanside communities of Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. On the east side, the Eaton Fire set ablaze the mountainside communities of Pasadena and Sierra Madre and overtook the town of Altadena, reducing much of it to ash.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Altadena was home to a burgeoning Black community and was hailed as the epicenter of Black arts activity in Los Angeles County. Though this designation arguably shifted to the South Central neighborhood of Watts in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Altadena continued to develop as a vibrant and creative haven with a distinctive Black cultural imprint. Since then, Altadena and the adjacent city of Pasadena have served as home to an extraordinary array of Black artists, educators, musicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and activists.

Ode to ’Dena lauds the rich and dynamic Black cultural heritage of Altadena. It surveys the town’s enduring legacy through the work and stories of an intergenerational group of artists and culture bearers that have called it home.

Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena is curated by Dominique Clayton, independent curator and founder of Dominique Gallery, in community with Larry Earl, Kenturah Davis, Arianne Edmonds, Dylan Joyner, and V. Joy Simmons, MD.

"altadena" Edition and Accordion Press Launch

Kenturah Davis, via accordion press:

I am pleased to share the inaugural edition of accordion press, a design studio that is an extension of my art practice. While accordion press has long been in development, it makes its debut in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires in January 2025. My home, along with my parents’ home, were lost in the Eaton fire. This experience has prompted me to create our first official release in support of artists affected by the disaster.

The inaugural edition of altadena, was created earlier this year to support the Alta/Pas Quilt Circle, a branch of the African American Quilters of Los Angeles guild. Several members were displaced by the fire, including my mother. As I reflect on the depth of my practice and the intentional integration of various art forms and materials, I am deeply grateful for the rich quilting legacy passed down through my mother’s artistry and the Alta/Pas Quilt Circle community. I feel it is essential to honor these women by showcasing their work and producing a limited-edition print to raise funds, ensuring they have the resources to continue their practice. Proceeds have gone to the group to provide the resources to continue their practice as an important part of our creative community.

Accordion press will also be the home for all my editions, including handmade artist books, prints and objects, available here, and will also highlight collaborations with other artists and workshops.

The Lapis Press Presents Two New Print Editions by Kenturah Davis

duration I (jada), 2024. archival pigment print mounted to 3D lenticular lens in walnut frame. 19.25 x 26.75 x 4 in. framed. edition of 10.

duration I (jada), 2024. (animated gif)

tangents (jada - marjani - marcella), 2024, archival pigment print on paper, 20 x 30 inches (unframed), edition of 40

In partnership with The Lapis Press, Kenturah Davis is proud to present two new photographic limited editions. For inquiries please contact The Lapis Press.

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Press Release:

Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you…There is something underneath that is incomplete.

-Toni Morrison and Nellie McKay. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” in Contemporary Literature

There's this thing about movement, obviously, yes: the sleight of the hand, of the shadow, slight reflection, some refraction, that place, that face, that knowing. Kenturah Davis is a master of this transition, shifting scope and focus in a single shot, commanding both viewer and subject into an ethereal fourth-dimensional space. With her lenticular print duration I (jada), 2024, and pigment print tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), 2024, Davis extends time through her compulsion to gather at the seams of movement locating a nearly intangible, unbound subject. Akin to jazz’s spontaneity and place on the edge, Davis’s photographs find focus in the instability and chatter that improvisation—be it light, aperture, or matter—offers in each moment. A single subject echos into infinite portals with duration I (jada) while in tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), the three women's bodies and physical space extend into diverging rays of light. Here, intent and chance play within the frame, while also highlighting the precipice of something just beyond the boundaries.

In the above epigraph, Toni Morrison looks to the profound innovation within the unknowing, what she names the underneath, that jazz offers in tone, pace, and illegibility. Davis, an artist committed to the utility/shadow/structure of language as a technology within her broad artistic practice, also finds herself within the realm of jazz’s underneath, blurring and collapsing edges of perception. In these two prints, language is the gesture relaying and creating a looking that is home in the incomplete.

Artist Statement:

The invitation from The Lapis Press to collaborate turned into a fulfilling lesson in walking in the dark…we felt our way through two years of r&d to emerge with two works that recalibrate the act of seeing. They portray the subtle, improvised movements among dancers to highlight the potent possibilities of our quotidian encounters. Creating a body of long exposure photographs that could be integrated into the sophisticated lenticular technology that The Lapis Press has developed proved to be an interesting challenge. Introducing a mirror into the scene of duration I - (jada) extended the experience of space and time as the subject’s gaze shifts across the frame. Ultimately, it delivers the illusive magic of lenticular images with a sense of ephemeral multiplicity.

tangents (jada - marjani - marcella), an archival pigment print on paper, foregrounds an anomaly of lights streaking around three figures. Even as they appear to be in a state of pause, the image proposes that nothing is static and every aspect of our reality is a dynamic orchestration of movement.

This new collaboration with The Lapis Press forms a bridge between photography and my extensive drawing practice. It highlights the significant role photography plays in my efforts to create images and objects that ask for slow looking and thoughtful reflection about how we perceive ourselves in the world.  - Kenturah Davis

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - clouds

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Opens Friday, May 31, 6:00 - 8:00 pm,

Walkthrough with Dr. Zoé Whitley, 6:00 - 6:30pm

5-6 Cork St. London W1S 3LQ

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present clouds, Kenturah Davis’ debut solo exhibition in the UK. The drawing series that comprise this show are united by a common text—an essay penned by Davis that explores perception as an expressive and existential state. The artist’s writing flows through themes of dance, African diaspora, musical notation, literature, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and theoretical physics, invoking the guiding voices of the choreographer Katherine Dunham, composer Florence B. Price, theorist Saidiya Hartman, author Toni Morrison, and physicist Carlo Rovelli. Each of Davis’ bodies of work is a study in movement that translates photographs taken by the artist. Though composed on a flat page, Davis recognises her drawings as dimensional vessels, planes where she charts, layers, and reimagines significance.

Two of Davis’ series are portrait-based: the first, grouped drawings of figures in various postures. During photo shoots for these studies, the artist invited Black women to come to her studio and improvise movement, capturing their gestures with long exposure photographs resulting in kinetic, unbound physiques. Drawing closer to the work, portions of Davis’ essay emerge, detailing the extraordinary careers of Katherine Dunham and Florence B. Price, two trailblazing Black creatives of the twentieth century who used art to pursue individual and societal metamorphosis. As a choreographer, Dunham infused dance with her background in anthropology, using her body as a vehicle to express radical ideas about space, time, and diaspora. As the first Black female musician to compose for a national symphony orchestra, Price arranged music to navigate states of instability, transition, and freedom—such as in her rediscovered piece Clouds.

Davis’ second portrait series features single drawings of figures framed with recessed mantles that display vessels of various proportions. Designed by the artist and carved by her partner, each of these sculptures was crafted from one of two types of wood: ebony from Ghana, where the artist lived for many years, and ash from Los Angeles, sourced from a tree at her home. These multimedia works can be likened to her series Text(tiles), multi-panel artworks that juxtapose portraits with woven fabrics, underscoring the etymological root of text from the Latin word “to weave.” Inserting a physical vessel into the image plane, she encourages her audience to comprehend thateach dimension of the work has the capacity to hold meaning—literally and figuratively.

The third series is a group of twelve drawings based on Davis’ snapshots of clouds. Building on the cloud as a symbolic muse for choreography and composition, she considers the natural formation through the lens of quantum physics. As a billowing mass made up of atomic particles, a cloud shifts between states of being solid, liquid, and gas—an element that fluctuates between the micro and macro. Drawing from Rovelli’s writings on the relativity of time, Davis’ compositions encourage her audience to question systems of artistry, science, philosophy, history, race, and gender for which meaning is assigned, not inherent. Welcoming shifting observations and evolving thoughts, her text and image reject an explicit reading.

For each work, Davis arranges the text in a new formation to highlight different passages, incising the sculptural passages into a polymer plate, then embossing them onto paper with an etching press. She scores each parchment with a grid - rendering the photograph section by section - using sharpened carbon pencils for portrait works and powdered indigo pigments for cloud works. With an exacting and meticulous hand, she creates a surface that resembles an ancient rubbing, emphasising how light and dark shadows reveal - rather than conceal - essential ideas within her essay. Through the blurred focus of the body, the soft edges of the cloud, and the swelling surface of the vessel, Davis balances the rigid with the fluid; the frame and grid for each serve as structured systems wherein physical and meteorological bodies roam freely.

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On Friday 31 May, Kenturah Davis and art historian and curator Dr. Zoé Whitley will lead a walkthrough of clouds, Davis’ debut solo exhibition in the UK. The drawing series that comprise this show are united by a common text—an essay penned by Davis that explores perception as an expressive and existential state. The artist’s writing flows through themes of dance, African diaspora, musical notation, literature, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and theoretical physics.

⁠Taking place from Friday 31 May – Sunday 2 June, we are extending our opening hours:

Friday 31 May, 11am–6pm, with a special opening event 6pm–8pm
Saturday 1 June, 11am–6pm
Sunday 2 June, 12–5pm

Dr. Zoé Whitley is Director of the non-profit Chisenhale Gallery in London. She co-curated the acclaimed Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power and its subsequent international tour (2017-2020). Whitley has distinguished herself working in UK institutions on exhibitions, research and collections (as curator of the British Council's 2019 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; 2014-2019 Tate Modern; 2013-2015 Tate Britain; 2003-2013 V&A). She writes for all reading ages including children's titles Meet the Artist: Frank Bowling; Meet the Artist: Sophie Taeuber-Arp; and serving as consultant for the award-winning Black Artists Shaping the World (Thames & Hudson). She is a Trustee of the Teiger Foundation and is a member of the London Mayor's Commission on Diversity in the Public Realm. She is the editor of Barkley L. Hendricks: Solid! (Akira, 2024). 

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Text courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery. Video by Dan Finlayson.