About
Brooks Davis II grew up between Atlanta, Jackson, Mississippi, and Savannah, moving between his parents after their divorce. He settled in Jackson with his mother and her family. When his grandmother was diagnosed with Leukemia, they moved to be near her. She died when Brooks was seven. He stayed until his grandfather's declining health made leaving possible. They moved to Savannah.
At eleven, he tore the ligaments, muscle, and tendon at the interior of his dominant elbow. The growth plate had fractured too — missed because it was still cartilage when it happened. He wouldn’t know this for nearly a decade. Doctors told him he might not regain full use of the arm. He auditioned for the Savannah Arts Academy anyway. He got in. He spent four years building a practice on what his arm gave him each day.
He started at SCAD in Architecture in 2014. Two years in, he added UX Design as a second major. The addition required redundant coursework and pushed his timeline out. His peers graduated on schedule. He stayed. Many now run design at Google, Meta, IBM, and Intel.
During COVID, he worked construction with his father. The repetitive work compounded a decade of prior damage. Doctors found the original injury had been worse than anyone knew — the same impact at eleven had also fractured the growth plate, undetected. The combined damage was the most severe simultaneous case of medial and lateral epicondylitis his medical team had documented. He changed his second major to a minor and graduated in 2022, eight years after he started.
In May 2023, he took a portrait of his dog to Forsyth Park. Within four days, he had a month of commissions booked. He has been drawing there since — on a schedule his arm tells him each morning, under a city-issued artist permit.
In 2024, his botanical graphite work received Third Place at Legacy in Bloom, a juried open exhibition at The Beach Institute — one of the oldest African American cultural institutions in the South. The submitted works were a series of small graphite studies of flowers. The show ran through January 2025.
In 2025, he exhibited original paintings at the Isle of Hope Art and Music Festival — the first public showing of a graphite-based paint he has been developing alongside his drawing practice.
In 2026, his pet portrait work was selected for the Marc Jacobs Bark Jacobs campaign through JuiceboxNYC. His paintings appear on four bags on marcjacobs.com and were featured in the campaign video.
He is based in Savannah, Georgia.