Alonzo Davis

We [found] through [the Brockman Gallery] that there were a lot of people who liked art, but we weren’t reaching the working class, certain segments of the middle class, and everyday people. They weren’t coming in the doors. Whereas, with murals and art in public places, they were confronted with it in their everyday traffic patterns. So, we tended to . . . look for public art sites where there was a lot of foot or automobile traffic. [With] Los Angeles being an automobile city, it [made] sense to put the art where there was the greatest circulation of people. They tended to be in cars.—Alonzo Davis

Alonzo Davis—artist, educator, and cofounder of the Brockman Gallery (active 1967–1989) in Leimert Park—shaped the landscape of Black cultural production in Los Angeles through both visual practice and institution building. Davis’s work merges rhythmic abstraction, Pan-African and Pan-Asian color sensibilities, and geometric repetition into a visual language attuned to movement and diasporic memory. Across his practice as a muralist, printmaker, and advocate, Davis championed public spaces as sites for affirmation, meditation, and legacy building. 

Davis’s mural Eye on ’84 (1984), originally painted along the 110 Freeway for the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, has been re-created for Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, where it can now be seen from a moving car on Wilshire Boulevard. A succession of three visual vignettes, each reminiscent of a quilt or a collage, Eye on ’84 appeared, in its original state, to be pinned to a banner suspended along the freeway’s retaining wall; here it is “pinned” to the museum. The mural brings together universal symbols—Olympic rings, pointing arrows, eyes, and hearts. To work out the composition, Davis worked on a much smaller scale. On view nearby is one of several preparatory studies that would inform the architecturally scaled mural. A painting this large required the efforts of many, and Davis worked with several leading muralists to ensure the success of Eye on ’84. The Olympic Mural Project was the last public art project that Davis would undertake. A light box of archival photographs documents the broader Olympic Mural Project.

Alonzo Davis was born in 1942 in Tuskegee, AL, and died in 2025 in Largo, MD. Davis was an artist, educator, activist, and cofounder of the legendary Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles (1967–1990). Selected solo exhibitions include the Fisher Gallery, Schlesinger Center, Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria, VA (2018); Prince George’s African American Museum & Cultural Center, North Brentwood, MD (2018); United States Embassy, Freetown, Sierra Leone (2014–15); East Hawai‘i Cultural Center, Hilo, HI (2006); East–West Center, Honolulu (1988); Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA (1987); Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles (1984, 1973); Watts Towers Arts Center, Los Angeles (1981); University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1980); William Grant Still Arts Center, Los Angeles (1978); Transition Gallery, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID (1976); Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA (1975); Pomona Public Library, CA (1975); and Just Above Midtown, New York (1975). Selected group exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2025, 1972); Lancaster Museum of Art, CA (2025); Washington Sculptors Group and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2022); Saint Louis Art Museum (2019); The David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD (2017); Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA (2013); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2011, 2005); Watts Towers Art Center, Los Angeles (2009); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1979, 1972); Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles (1977); Just Above Midtown, New York (1974); and the Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles (1967). Recent honors and awards include a Denbo Fellowship from the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Hyattsville, MD (2018) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the James A. Porter Colloquium at Howard University, Washington, DC (2016). Davis earned a BA from Pepperdine University, Los Angeles (1964), and a BFA and an MFA from the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles (1971, 1973).