Alonzo Davis, 82, Whose L.A. Gallery Became a Hub for Black Art, Dies

Alonzo Davis, a Los Angeles-based artist whose murals and public sculptures celebrated the gyrating mix of cultures he encountered in Southern California, and whose gallery, Brockman, brought national awareness to the renaissance in Black art during the late 1960s, died on Jan. 27 in Largo, Md. He was 82.

Christopher Heijnen, whose gallery, Parrasch Heijnen, represents Mr. Davis’s work, confirmed the death, at a hospital. He did not specify a cause. Mr. Davis had moved to Hyattsville, Md., in the early 2000s.

Across the country, the 1960s saw an explosion in Black cultural activity, but many Black painters and sculptors were frustrated in their efforts to break into the mainstream art market, which was dominated by white artists and gallery owners.

The situation was especially acute in Los Angeles, where Black artists responded forcefully to the social and racial tumult set off by the civil rights movement and the unrest in the city’s Watts section in 1965, rioting instigated by reports of police brutality at a traffic stop.

That creative energy found a home at the Brockman Gallery, which Mr. Davis and his brother, Dale Brockman Davis, also an artist, founded in 1967 in Leimert Park, a neighborhood southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

“After the Watts riot, there were a lot of artists doing works that were politically significant,” Mr. Davis said in the 2006 documentary “Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South-Central Los Angeles,” directed by Jeannette Lindsay. “We filled a gap and a void there. We just opened a window that had never been available, especially on the West Coast.”

They did more than showcase artists. Brockman became a community hub where politics, art and education intersected. In 1973, the brothers created Brockman Productions, a partner organization that ran art festivals, concerts and continuing education programs for people in and around South-Central Los Angeles.

Mr. Davis continued to grow as an artist himself. Influenced by his travels across the American South, Africa and Latin America, as well as by white artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he specialized in assemblages, mixed-media sculptures that blurred the line between representational and abstract work.

He liked to work in series, taking a single element — a piece of fabric, a shaft of bamboo — then spending years iterating on it. Among his best-known series was “Power Poles,” a decade-long exploration of burnished bamboo as a symbol of authority in West African cultures.

Much of his work was public, often commissioned by local government agencies; in 2005, he created a version of “Power Poles” for the Philadelphia International Airport.

He was especially attracted to large murals, a common art form around Los Angeles. He painted streetside works throughout the 1970s, and in 1983 he was placed in charge of a 10-artist project to create murals along the city’s freeways for the 1984 Olympics.

Mr. Davis’s contribution, “Eye on ’84,” was composed of three trompe l’oeil murals along a retaining wall on the Harbor Freeway.

“This is new imagery reflective of new energy; this is not the California myth,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. “The murals will be like a color bath as you drive by them. They will be our new landmarks and will give a true picture of Los Angeles as a multicultural community.”

Alonzo Joseph Davis Jr. was born on Feb. 2, 1942, in Tuskegee, Ala., near the Tuskegee Institute, where his father, Alonzo Sr., taught psychology and his mother, Agnes (Moses) Davis, was a librarian.

His parents divorced when Alonzo was a teenager, after which he and his brother moved with their mother to Los Angeles.

He received a bachelor’s degree in art education from Pepperdine University in 1964, then spent several years teaching high school art in Los Angeles. He also painted and sculpted, but despaired over the way Black artists were shut out of galleries and art history programs.

In 1966, he and his brother packed up their green Volkswagen Beetle for a cross-country pilgrimage of sorts, visiting prominent Black artists and creative communities across the South, in New York and in Canada.

In New York, they met the painter Romare Bearden, whose work they would later show at Brockman. In Mississippi, they walked alongside the civil rights activist James Meredith during his “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

Their last stop was Chicago, after which they drove almost nonstop to Los Angeles, talking about their experiences and plans.

“We are driving through what I would call the cornfields and the desert to get back to Los Angeles,” Mr. Davis said in a 2022 interview with the art company Black Art in America, “and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could open an art gallery?’”

They opened Brockman, named for their maternal grandmother, a year later.

Mr. Davis returned to the classroom in 1970 to study at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles with Charles White, a Black artist and major influence on Mr. Davis’s generation of painters. It was Mr. White who encouraged Mr. Davis to work in series.

He received a bachelor’s in fine arts in 1971 and a master’s in fine arts in 1973, both from Otis.

The Brockman Gallery proved a lasting success — so much so that Mr. Davis found little time for his own work. He wanted to travel, and in 1987 he left the gallery, and Los Angeles, to run a state arts program in Sacramento.

A year later, he took a residency in Hawaii, after which he became a dean at the Art Institute of San Antonio. He was academic dean of the Memphis College of Art from 1993 to 2002, then moved to Maryland.

His marriage to Rebecca Braithwaite ended in divorce. He is survived by his brother; his partner, Kay Lindsey; his daughters, Paloma Allen-Davis and Treasure Davis; and two grandsons.

Within a few years of the Los Angeles Olympics, the murals that Mr. Davis and other artists had created in celebration were disappearing, covered by graffiti and worn away by freeway pollution, then painted over by the highway authority in 2007.

The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles began a yearlong restoration project in 2014. Many of the works were salvaged, but Mr. Davis’s triptych, buried under decades of paint and soot, were lost forever.