Kenturah Davis
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 her artistic expression. Art was as consistent as the air she breathed.
“I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t making it,” Davis says. Her interest in portraits has also been consistent. “That’s been the driving force, being interested in human interaction.”
Born in Glendale and raised in Altadena, Davis received her bachelor’s from Occidental College. In 2013, she flew to Ghana to be 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 fall 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.” When she’s not teaching, Davis usually flies to New Haven, Conn., for her yearlong NXTHVN (Next Haven) fellowship, where she’s 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’d been thinking about “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” the website and YouTube channel by John Koenig, who invents words for 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 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 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.”