


Before Picasso
2025
Before Picasso is a monumental outdoor sculpture by Los Angeles based artist Karon Davis, installed as part of the West Hollywood Urban Art Program in 2025. The work features a stacked totemic form rendered in deep violet hues, evoking an abstracted human figure composed of biomorphic interlocking volumes. The sculptural language draws on pre Cubist and African sculptural traditions, positioning the work as an assertion of artistic genealogy that predates and informs the Western canon. Davis is known for her figurative sculpture and installation work that centers Black identity, memory, and the body.
- Medium
- Painted cast sculpture
- Spotted At
- Public SpaceView on map
Notes
Installed as part of the West Hollywood Urban Art Program. Plaque reads: Karon Davis / Before Picasso / 2025 / West Hollywood Urban Art Program. GPS coordinates of photograph: 34.081754, -118.381457.
Spotted works by Karon Davis
Artists in conversation

Simone Leigh
American · b. 1967

Leigh creates monumental painted cast sculptures with totemic biomorphic forms that draw explicitly on African sculptural traditions and center Black female identity, sharing Davis's assertion of non Western artistic genealogy through abstracted figurative volumes.

Wangechi Mutu
Kenyan · b. 1972

Mutu works with interlocking biomorphic sculptural forms rendered in bold chromatic treatments that reference African artistic lineages while challenging Western canonical hierarchies, closely mirroring the totemic abstracted figuration and genealogical assertion in Davis's piece.

Theaster Gates
American · b. 1973

Gates produces large scale sculptural works with stacked totemic forms that reclaim and recontextualize pre Western cultural traditions as foundational artistic languages, sharing Davis's visual strategy of asserting non Western origins that predate and inform the Western canon.
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