Moto3 rider Noah Dettwiler remains in a “stable but still critical” condition after being involved in a serious crash at the Malaysian Grand Prix on Sunday.
Dettwiler, 20, collided with Moto3 world champion Jose Antonio Rueda during a sighting lap before their race.
Moto3 is the entry-level class below Moto2 and MotoGP.
“Noah has undergone several surgeries in the last few hours, which went well,” the rider’s CIP Green Power team and his family said in a statement.
“According to the doctors in charge, his condition is stable but still critical.
“We appreciate your understanding and ask that Noah and his family’s privacy be respected at this time.
“Thank you for all your incredible support and messages.”
Los Angeles County agreed to pay $20 million Tuesday to the family of Noah Cuatro, a 4-year-old Palmdale boy who was tortured to death by his parents in 2019.
The case brought intense scrutiny of the county’s child welfare system after it was revealed that the Department of Children and Family Services had failed to remove Noah from his parents despite a court order.
DCFS had been given 10 days to get Noah away from his parents and seen by a doctor after multiple reports of neglect and abuse, The Times previously reported. The department ignored the order.
He died less than two months later, right before his fifth birthday. His parents later pleaded no contest to murder and torture charges.
“He always begged me not to send him to his parents,” said Eva Hernandez, Noah’s great-grandmother. “I tried to explain to him so many times, but he didn’t understand. He’d take his little hands and look into my eyes and say, ‘Don’t make me go there.’”
Eva Hernandez cries while remembering her great-grandson Noah Cuatro as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors prepares to approve a $20-million settlement to his family.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Hernandez sued DCFS in 2020, alleging the department had failed her grandson and should have intervened to keep him safe. Cuatro had been under the supervision of the agency from the time he was born because his mother had been accused of fracturing his half sister’s skull.
The child welfare department said since Noah’s death they’ve hired thousands of social workers to decrease caseloads and retrained social workers on interviewing techniques and use of forensic exams.
“It is DCFS’ hope that this resolution gives Noah’s family a sense of peace,” the department said in a statement. “DCFS remains committed to learning from the past, improving its work, and operating with transparency.”
At the time of his death, Noah remained under supervision by DCFS despite more than a dozen reports to the child abuse hotline and police from callers who believed that he and his siblings were being abused.
Attorney Brian Claypool, who represented Cuatro’s family in the lawsuit, said Noah’s death was a direct result of the county failing to follow the court order to remove him from his parents. A Superior Court judge had agreed to remove him after a social worker filed a 26-page request with the court, citing evidence of abuse.
“The county really blew it with the removal order. There’s no excuse for them not to have picked up Noah,” Claypool said. “The most shocking, upsetting part of this case is when I took the deposition of the social worker in the case and the two supervisors, none of the individuals read the petition of all the abuse that was submitted to the court. That was inexcusable.”
Eva Hernandez holds a photo of her great-grandson Noah Cuatro.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Noah’s parents initially called 911 on July 5, 2019, saying their son had drowned in a swimming pool of their apartment complex, but authorities grew suspicious after finding the boy unconscious and dry in the apartment. Doctors later found bruises across his body and signs of “mottling” around his neck.
County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes Palmdale, called his death a “heartbreaking tragedy.”
“While nothing can undo the harm he suffered, today’s $20 million settlement awarded to his surviving siblings and grandmother provides some measure of support as they continue to heal,” she said in a statement. “Noah’s life was not in vain. His case has reinforced the need for ongoing review of child welfare cases, stronger partnerships with our schools, and a stabilized DCFS workforce to better protect children in the Antelope Valley. Noah leaves behind a legacy — he will not be forgotten.”
His great-grandmother, Hernandez, said she still thinks of him every day.
“I know that he’s not suffering anymore,” she said.
Kickers have been making long field goals look routine at the college and NFL level. Now they’re becoming the same in high school football.
Noah Thayer, a senior at JSerra, has booted field goals from 55 and 54 yards this season, made a game-winning 31-yard field goal against Oak Hills and is 16 for 16 on PATs.
There’s lots of kickers this season with the ability to try long field goals, but they must first get the permission from their coach. JSerra coach Victor Santa Cruz said Thayer has his complete confidence.
“It’s an easy decision when you have a weapon like Noah,” Santa Cruz said. “It’s exciting to have him. He’s been developing since he was a freshman. He’s just a confident kid.”
Thayer said he gained strength and muscle in the offseason, going from 5-feet-8, 140 pounds to 5-9, 165 to help him increase his distance on kicks. He’s missed field goals from 60 and 55 yards.
Other long field goals this season include a 50-yarder from Mel Huerta of Lawndale, a 49-yarder from Nico Talbott of Mira Costa and a 49-yarder from Ishaan Kedia of Portola.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].
Lyles, dethroned as world 100m champion on Sunday as he took bronze, captured gold in his favoured discipline five days later to secure his eighth global title.
He had produced a statement performance in Thursday’s semi-finals, setting the fastest time of 2025 in 19.51 seconds.
After a final where he was just 0.01 seconds slower, he celebrated by raising four fingers to the crowd.
It was at the World Championships two years ago that Lyles asserted himself as the dominant male sprinter on the sport’s biggest stages with three golds in Budapest, before claiming the Olympic 100m title at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Prior to the championships, Lyles told reporters that he would take bronze in the 100m if it meant he would get 200m gold by breaking Bolt’s world-record time.
He got the gold – but Bolt’s record remains elusive for now.
Lyles’ American team-mate Kenny Bednarek had to settle for silver – his fourth in a row across the last four Olympic and world championships.
Bednarek and Lyles have a tempestuous relationship, and almost came to blows at the US trials when Lyles stared down his opponent in beating him to the 200m title, to which Bednarek responded with a shove.
Bronze went to 21-year-old Jamaican Bryan Levell, with Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo fourth. Britain’s Zharnel Hughes ran a season-best 19.78 for fifth.
Coronation Street star Richard Winsor will bow out of the ITV soap next week after months of playing the villain in a ‘twisted’ storyline involving Todd and Theo
23:54, 18 Sep 2025Updated 23:55, 18 Sep 2025
Richard Winsor has been playing Noah Hedley on the long-running serial for the past few months, and is at the centre of a controversial storyline
When Theo Silverton (James Cartwright) made his debut on the programme, he was introduced as a married man who had two kids with wife Danielle (Natalie Anderson) before it was revealed that he had been put through conversion therapy earlier in life. After his wife left him once his affair with Todd Grimshaw (Gareth Pierce) was exposed, she struck up a relationship with homophobic church clerk Noah, and he has been on a campaign of hate ever since.
The church clerk has also ruffled feathers by interrupting Danielle and Theo’s family liaison meetings and trying to replace him as the dad in their life, whilst running series of so-called conversion sessions at the local community centre. But now, his tenure on the cobbles is all about to come to an end in what is being teased as an ‘explosive’ set of scenes.
Todd Grimshaw recently tried to take matters into his own hands as Billy (Daniel Brocklebank) looked on in despair
An insider told The Sun : “Richard’s done a great job as Noah. He was brought in as a guest star for a specific storyline and he’s knocked it out of the park playing such a twisted villain.
“But the character will leave next week and it’s set to be explosive and spark fireworks on the cobbles!” The whole drama with Noah has also had a massive effect on Todd, as Theo has turned nasty towards him amid it all.
Viewers have seen Todd become a victim of control as he was forbidden from seeing former boyfriend Billy Mayhew (Daniel Brocklebank), and in disturbing scenes that aired last month, Theo grabbed hold of him and forced him to eat a kebab.
Spoilers have already revealed that next week, as Theo is quizzed about his violent temper, Theo assures them a moment with son Miles was an accident. But it’s Theo’s partner Todd who’s left lashing out when Noah makes derogatory remarks under his breath.
Theo has started to control Todd whilst Noah has been on the scene
Todd ends up being escorted out by security, but will this impact Theo’s case? Later on Noah tracks the couple down and makes homophobic jibes at them – but he’s furious when Theo refuses to rise to it.
When Danielle soon arrives with some shock news about Noah, what has happened and how will Theo react? The next day, Todd is left baffled by Theo’s reaction to the news about Noah when all he ever did was make Theo’s life a misery.
He also had a part in Hollyoaks for a period of time, but, outside of television, he is known for his theatre work. A trained dancer as well, he has starred in productions of Edward Scissorhands, Swan Lake, and Saturday Night Fever.
Coronation Street runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8pm on ITV1. Episodes can also be downloaded on ITVX.
“The Pitt” may not be set in Los Angeles, but its cast and creatives are proud that it’s filmed there.
HBO Max’s hour-by-hour look at an emergency room shift in a Pittsburgh hospital took home the Emmy Award for best drama series on Sunday, and its cast and creatives dedicated their recognition to healthcare workers. Once they got backstage, they advocated for something else: increasing production in Los Angeles.
Speaking to press after the series’ big win, creator R. Scott Gemmill and star and executive producer Noah Wyle said they believe filming locally is important for the entertainment industry in Los Angeles as production rates have declined over the past several years because of a confluence of issues, including the pandemic, the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 and more attractive tax incentives in other states and countries.
Both “The Pitt” and “The Studio,” which won the top prize in the comedy category, are shot in L.A., but the latter is actually set in the city, centering on a fictional Hollywood studio and satirizing the entertainment industry.
Gemmill, who was also a producer on “ER,” said he feels pride in knowing “The Pitt” serves as an example of a series that was successfully filmed in L.A. “When we get casting, I think they get like 3,000 submissions for each role,” he said. “That’s how hungry the people are that work in Los Angeles, so just the fact that we can do our small part is really important, but I hope other producers take note.”
Wyle, who won two Emmy awards, one as an executive producer on the series and one for lead actor in a drama, echoed Gemmill’s comments and said he attended the ceremony in July where Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California’s film tax credit boost into law. It will increase the cap on California’s film and TV tax credit program to $750 million, up from $330 million. Wyle said he gave a speech at the event, sharing his experience filming locally.
“I talked about our special effects coordinator on our show, whose name is Rob Nary, whose father was a special effects coordinator, whose grandfather was a special effects coordinator,” Wyle said. “I said it to highlight the fact that there’s generational talent in this city that’s worked in this industry for over 100 years. When you shoot a show here, you get the benefit of three generations of talent. You get a Rob Nary. You can put up a soundstage in another state, but they don’t come with Rob Narys.”
While production in L.A. overall is still on the decline according to the nonprofit organization FilmLA, which tracks production in the Greater Los Angeles region, television is serving as a bright spot. From April through June, TV production saw an increase of 17% compared with the same time period last year, with 2,224 on-location shoot days. That’s the highest total since early 2024, though it is still 32.6% lower than the five-year quarterly average, FilmLA said in a report published this summer.
Overall, on-location shoot days from April to June decreased 6.2% compared with the same time period last year.
Paul Audley, FilmLA’s president, responded to the Emmy wins for shows that shoot in town, saying in a statement to The Times that the organization “thanks them for choosing to film locally, and for helping to make Los Angeles the entertainment capital of the world.”
“These productions not only highlight the overwhelming talent that this region is known for, but productions like these employ hundreds of film industry workers and contribute to a strong and thriving economy,” Audley said. “Filming locally supports our communities, small businesses, and workers across every corner of the film industry.”
EUGENE, Ore. — Track turned into a contact sport Sunday when Kenny Bednarek shoved Noah Lyles after Lyles beat him to the finish line in the 200-meter final at U.S. championships.
Lyles reeled in Bednarek in the homestretch to win in 19.63 seconds.
As he was crossing the finish line, Lyles turned to Bednarek in the lane next to him and started jawing at him. A few steps after they crossed, Bednarek reached out and gave Lyles a two-handed shove.
Lyles turned around, backpedaled and reached his arms out, then kept jawing at Bednarek. Their argument continued into the start of the NBC interview.
“I tell ya, if you’ve got a problem, I expect a call,” Bednarek said.
Asked by the network’s Lewis Johnson what happened, Bednarek said: “I’m not going to say it out here, but we got something to do and talk about.”
The next chapter figures to play out Sept. 19 in Japan, where they’ll be among the favorites in the 200-meter final. Lyles is trying to match Usain Bolt with four straight world titles in his best race.
Lyles had a slow start to a season that has featured Bednarek opening as the dominant sprinter of 2025. Bednarek won the 100 meters Friday and also beat Lyles at the Olympics last year, finishing second in a race in which Lyles won bronze while suffering with COVID-19.
“It was a pretty difficult championship,” Lyles said. “I’ve been tired. It’s been rough. Coming out here when you’re not 100% and being able to say, ‘I still got to give my all no matter what happens.’ That’s tough. That’s tough.”
Noah Lyles, second left, wins the men’s 200-meter final at the U.S. championships on Sunday.
(Abbie Parr / Associated Press)
Melissa Jefferson-Wooden won the 200 in a personal-best time of 21.84 seconds, while Olympic champion Gabby Thomas had to wait a few anxious moments to see if she earned a spot on the world team. She did as her named popped up in third place.
It was a winning weekend for Jefferson-Wooden, who also captured the 100 on Friday. She will be joined in the 100 at worlds by Sha’Carri Richardson, who has an automatic spot as the defending champion. Richardson didn’t advance to the final in the 200.
The women’s 400 hurdles was wide open with Olympic champion and world-record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone electing to focus on the open 400 (she won the event Saturday ). Dalilah Muhammad, 35, took control and cruised to the win.
One of the afternoon’s most exciting finishes was in the men’s 800 meters, where 2019 world champion Donavan Brazier used a strong kick to hold off 16-year-old Cooper Lutkenhaus and Bryce Hoppel.
On the stunning “What’s It All For” on her new album, “I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me,” Noah Cyrus sings: “Why have a family/If that ain’t what you want?/Why have a child/You don’t know how to love?
I’ve asked all of these questions/And I got one more/If that’s all there is/Then what’s it all for?/What’s it all for?”
Cyrus, often writing with Australian singer-songwriter PJ Harding, has a way of storytelling that captures the grit and highs and lows of real life the way Kris Kristofferson does on the classic “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down,” or John Mellencamp and Lucinda Williams do.
Her song, “July,” released when she was 19, was praised by the likes of John Mayer and Leon Bridges and has more than a billion streams. So the potential for something special has always been there. But now that she has put it all together on “I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me” the result transcends special. The 11 songs on the album bridge storytelling with classic country and folk sounds that hark back to the ‘70s, a la songs like the Eagles’ “Wasted Time.”
“I hope that this record, when I hear it, I hear something that’s very classic and reminds me of music that’s been around for a very long time,” she says.
Cyrus has that “classic” music in her blood and bones. Old soul is often a trite, overused expression, but when you grow up in a famous family in the public eye, as Noah Cyrus has, it is an accurate one — her father is country music veteran Billy Ray Cyrus and her sister is pop star Miley Cyrus.
Cyrus said she grew up faster than most people her age. “I’ve been touring since I was 16, I’ve been making music since I was 16,” she tells The Times. “ I grew up in a family that was in the public eye. I think with that there were certain things that we could and couldn’t do, that felt restricted because of the public eye or the way we’d be judged or the way we were judged whenever we made mistakes just as kids.”
She turned 25 in January, which brought a new maturity. Like another all-time great songwriter, Jackson Browne, who famously wrote “These Days” when he was 16, Cyrus has shown a wisdom beyond her years.
“I found out a lot about my senses on a song and learning to trust that as a songwriter,” Cyrus said. “I learned a lot how to lead for myself as a musician.”
(Jason Renaud)
She addresses growing up throughout the album. “I turned 25 this January and I talk about this on the record It’s one of the themes of the album … growing up and new countries about walking on your own two feet and going into unknown land and no matter where you go, there you are. And just learning how to deal with that and cope with that as a young adult,” she says. “That was something that was going on at the time of creating this record. That’s why I just fell into the themes because as a person I was like, ‘How do I not second-guess myself with every single move? How do I learn to trust myself? How do I learn how to become an adult that’s going to be a mother one day? How do I grow up so one day I can take care of another actual person?’”
Having confronted fame and the insecurity that comes with youth, she was ready to take control of her artistic vision with this album.
“I found out a lot about my senses on a song and learning to trust that as a songwriter. I learned a lot how to lead for myself as a musician. This is the first record that I have actual producer credits on and I actually produce some of these songs with Mike [Crossey],” she says. “It was a really beautiful experience and a great learning experience. I really was surprised by those intuitions. And when I listened to the final product, I think it’s the first time in my career where I’m actually really proud of myself.”
Cyrus made sure her personal touch was felt on every aspect of the record, including the eclectic quartet of guests: Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Bill Callahan, Ella Langley and Blake Shelton.
She made sure the invite to Shelton on “New Country” came directly from her. “I really wanted to personally talk to Blake and wrote him a letter and did all the things to really make this a personal connection,” she says. “Blake and I have a mutual friend on the song — Amy Wadge, she’s one of my favorite songwriters and I love her so much. It was like a God thing telling me you have to reach out to Blake. When I heard that song, it was Blake’s from the beginning. And Blake made it happen. It felt like this spiritual thing that was bound to happen and something that was just written up there in the stars was having Blake on this record.”
For all the notable guests, the centerpiece of the album fittingly features Cyrus’ grandfather. The mesmerizing spiritual hymn “Apple Tree,” which is like the love child of a Nick Cave song and Dolly Parton track, is built around her grandfather’s voice.
“I do feel like ‘Apple Tree’ is a song from God because of the prayer that is said at the end and spoken by my grandfather Ron Cyrus,” she says.
It’s fitting that the song features her grandfather because “I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me” is very much Cyrus returning to her Nashville roots and the music she grew up around. Though she says it’s just a happy accident, her embracing the music that is her birthright coincides with the surge in popularity of country music.
“When I was making this album, country was really getting its mainstream momentum again and taking over the world again as it was when I was a baby, when CMA fans used to have Fanfare and stuff. I remember my dad doing Fanfare. For me it’s really awesome because I think country music has so much more of a wider audience and so many people are starting to connect with country,” she says. “I think that was just God’s timing with the album and everything and it all lining up.”
While artists have been increasingly embracing country, for Cyrus this wasn’t about a trend — she was following the natural order of things. Many musicians will say that as they get older, they return to their roots.
So this was Cyrus coming home. “The more freedom I got I just kept putting more and more of myself into the record, which is metaphorically and literally back to my roots. I think I’ve been longing to feel closer to where I come from. I put that into my music and that’s such a beautiful outlet for me. And I think there’s so many people, not just kids, as an adult, as your parent, you feel things, they’re just like you and the child inside you, it’s all still broken, no matter how old you get, you still have that inner child inside of you. I think a lot of that inner child goes into my music and you hear a lot of my inner child.”
Though Cyrus loves the storytelling aspect of classic country records, it is just as much about the sound of those albums and artists as it is the lyrics. She reveled in that raw, organic sound in making this album.
“The more freedom I got I just kept putting more and more of myself into the record, which is metaphorically and literally back to my roots,” Cyrus said.
(Hannah DeVries)
“That was a fun thing for me again to learn is when you take all the bells and whistles away on a vocal and you just have that person’s originality and that person’s personality and let that shine through on a vocal. That’s the best thing you can do, just have the most amazing and natural raw vocals for people to hear and that’s what I love about the genre of country music and especially older records where you’re singing full takes and that’s what the record is. That’s a lot of the time what Mike and I like to do with our songs, is our songs are full takes of everything. We like everything to feel live, and I think that’s an important part of the record.”
The goal was an album that defies categorization and time. She wanted a record that if you had found it in 1975 and put it on right next to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” or you played it in 2025 it would have sounded of that time. In her pursuit of that lofty goal, she transcends the genre tag. This isn’t what most people think of as country today. The closest contemporary artist would be Chris Stapleton, who, when seen live, embodies a Neil Young solo acoustic; it could be country, folk, rock.
That’s what Cyrus set out to do. “When I hear it, I hear a record that will hopefully give the listener a chance to heal as it was a really healing experience for myself,” she says. “And I hope that this record, for me, is something that in 20 years … people are still mentioning and it’s a monumental album in the timeline of my career.”
U.S. sprinter Noah Lyles thinks he’s the fastest man in the world.
Tyreek Hill, the Miami Dolphins receiver with the nickname “Cheetah,” thinks he could beat Lyles in a race.
The two men announced earlier this year that they would settle this most pressing of matters on the track, without offering many other details.
Now, however, it seems the world may never know which of them is truly its fastest runner.
Speaking to reporters Monday at the Stagwell Global Sport Beach event in Cannes, France, the 27-year-old Lyles revealed that his race against Hill, 31, actually had been slated to take place “this weekend” in Times Square but had been called off at some point because of unspecified “complications” and “personal reasons.”
“We were very deep into creating the event. In fact, it was supposed to happen this weekend,” Lyles said. “Unfortunately, there were some things — complications, personal reasons — [and] it just didn’t come to pass.
“But, I mean, we were all in. We were going to have a big event. We were going to shut down New York Times Square and everything. We were gonna have all the billboards for the event. It was going to be a lot of fun.”
Lyles was the world champion in the 200 meters in 2019, 2022 and 2023 and in the 100 in 2023. At last year’s Paris Olympics, he won gold in the 100 and bronze in the 200, later saying he had COVID-19 during those Games.
Following his 2023 world title, Lyles drew attention by telling reporters that teams that win the championship of a league based primarily or entirely in the United Statesare not technically world champions, despite what those athletes might claim.
“World champion of what?” Lyles asked. “The United States?”
During 2024 training camp, podcast host Kay Adams mentioned Lyles’ comments to Hill and asked the speedy receiver if he’d like to race Lyles.
“I would beat Noah Lyles,” replied Hill, a former high school track star who won the 100 and 200 at the 2012 Georgia 5A state meet and ran the 40-yard dash in 4.29 at his 2015 pro day. “I’m not going to beat him by a lot, but I would beat Noah Lyles.”
Lyles’ personal bests are 9.79 seconds in the 100 and 19.31 seconds in the 200. He told Bleacher Report in May that he thought his time in the 40 would be “somewhere between a 4.1 and a 4.2.”
In February, immediately after winning the 60 at the Indoor Grand Prix, Lyles held a scrap of paper in front of his face that read, “Tyreek Could Never.” Last week, after running a personal-best time of 10.15 in a 100-meter preliminary at a Last Chance Sprint Series event at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame, Hill held up a sign that read “Noah Could Never.”
While the two men apparently had been slated to settle their feud on the track, now it looks like that’s not going to happen. Hill took to X on Tuesday to post a version of a popular meme featuring Homer Simpson fading into the bushes, with Lyles’ face super-imposed over that of the cartoon character.
“@LylesNoah after seeing me run the 100m last weekend,” Hill wrote.
The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32.
The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis’ accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show’s three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed.
That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” which hangs alone in the show’s entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.’s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell.
In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting’s otherwise neutral palette. It’s easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich.
Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas
(Anna Arca)
The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn’t last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn’s back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he’s going to ride it forward.
Perhaps the canvas’ most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace.
Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis’ lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in “40 Acres and a Unicorn” recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London’s Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis’ unusual exploratory strategies.
Titled “Nobody,” a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich’s radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915.
Noah Davis, “Nobody,” 2008, house paint on linen
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles)
The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich’s art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,” most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy.
“Nobody” weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It’s one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.
Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis’ choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker’s often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg’s hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis’ torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip.
That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. (“Nobody” almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — “somebody” — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind “Mary Jane,” a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet’s “The Railway,” is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms.
Noah Davis, “Mary Jane,” 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas
(Kerry McFate)
So is the forest of “The Missing Link 6,” where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis’ intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise.
Art history is threaded throughout Davis’ work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran’s celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout “1975 (8),” where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool.
The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, “The Missing Link 4,” has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise.
For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction.
Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In “1975 (8),” the title’s date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court’s appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled.
Noah Davis, “The Missing Link 4,” 2013, oil on canvas
(Robert Wedemeyer)
The 2013 painting’s composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis’ mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in.
Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist’s metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we’re left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna’s Italian Renaissance painting of a “Dead Christ” or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha.
The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, “Imitation of Life.” The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s.
Not all of Davis’ paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of “Maury” with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art’s messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving.
Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist’s reputation. At any rate it’s just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis’ abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show’s reality is better.
Noah Davis, “Imitation of Jeff Koons,” 2013, mixed media
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
‘Noah Davis’
Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood When: Through Aug. 31. Closed Monday. Info: (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu
