After settling into a new home in Highland Park, a space she moved into in September, Kenturah Davis is in the midst of a life transition.
She doesn’t cook, so she converted her dining room into her studio space. Her living room is still mostly empty, except for the wooden couch her dad built. She redid its cushions, now cream-colored, and quilted inserts for its pillows using residual fabric from other sewing projects. It’s what she loves about quilting — the part about “being able to use small pieces left over from something else and giving it new life.”
She learned to quilt and sew from her mother, a homemaker. Her father, now retired, was a set painter for TV and film, though he’d occasionally pick up graphic design jobs.
From the time she was young, her parents nurtured and encouraged her artistic expression. She distinctly remembers her father taking her and her sisters to the Rose Bowl to paint en plein air.
Art was as consistent as the air she breathed.
“I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t making it,” Davis says in a cool, calm voice. Her interest in portraits has also been consistent. “That’s been the driving force and being interested in human interaction and the nature of that.”
But as she’s evolved and matured artistically, people’s relationship with language has increasingly fueled her work.
Born in Glendale and raised in Altadena, Davis received her bachelor’s from Occidental College. After she left a job in a gallery, she got the chance to work abroad.
She flew to Ghana in 2013 to take a job as a production manager for her friend’s clothing line. What was supposed to be a six-month trip became a stay of nearly two years, off and on.
She’s never stopped going back. And her creative work has been directly, deeply influenced by her time there.
“Everything was just so vivid,” Davis says about Ghana. “I was hypersensitive to all the sensory experiences: the smells, the sights, the sounds, everything.” West African textiles — with their intricate weaving designs, bright hues and meaningful patterns encoded with information — also began influencing her work.
Where most of her art was — and still is — black and white (she’s interested in the relationship between text and a white page), she’s begun incorporating more color into her work.
In the fall of 2018, shortly after finishing her master’s program at the Yale School of Art, Davis landed a teaching gig at Occidental — a move she didn’t anticipate so soon after graduating.
But the opportunity presented itself when a former printmaking professor phasing into retirement invited her to take over a few of her classes.
“It just seemed insane to turn it down.” She remembers how her favorite educators helped her define the kind of teacher she wanted to be.
“What I liked about them is that they created a situation where the class was a time for thinking through a problem and experimenting without necessarily presuming what the results would be,” she says. And that left room for the teacher to also learn.
When she’s not teaching, Davis usually flies to New Haven, Conn., for her yearlong NXTHVN (Next Haven) fellowship, where she’s learning professional development skills, mentoring local youth, and making art in a “beautiful” studio with windows facing the street.
When Davis was commissioned to make art for downtown Inglewood’s station, she had been thinking a lot about “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” the website and YouTube channel by John Koenig, who invents words for powerful emotions.
“I was really interested in one word … ‘sonder,’” a word, she says, “that poetically describes the experience of noticing a stranger and being curious about what their lives are like and thinking about how your life might intersect with theirs.”
It was the perfect word to fixate on for the project, she thought, since trains and public transportation spaces are where strangers often clash, especially in a city where most people drive.
So she took the word and its definition and stamped it on the background of her drawings, drawings of people she photographed interacting with or observing each other who were somehow associated with Inglewood.
She hopes her work inspires curiosity in commuters. Curiosity about the people she drew, about others on the train. She hopes it makes them think about their relationship to language, about the word “sonder.”
And with her art, she hopes to create more opportunities for moments of serendipity.
This excerpt is taken from a longer article, which can be found below.