I write and make art from a black perspective because I think it’s needed and it makes me feel like I own my stories. I feel like it’s beautiful, it’s resistant and it’s powerful.
Author: Christabel Johanson
Liz Johnson Artur
For Artur photography is about cultivating trust between the artist and the subject. Her focus is on representing people the way they want to be represented. Documenting that in a picture is a form of conservation and she has kept her lens on the Black community, focusing on the everyday moments that present themselves.
Christabel Johanson on Liz Johnson Artur
Untitled, 1996-2012, courtecy Brooklyn Museum, copyright Liz Johnson Artur Read more »
Jennifer Packer at Serpentine Galleries London
Packer has previously said she has contemplated the devotion and fixation artists put into the process of creating. As such the show’s name is derived from a scripture in the Bible, “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing”.
Christabel Johanson writes about the American artist Jennifer Packer.
Jess, 2018. Photo Jason Wyche. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
Kwesi Botchway
Botchway’s exhibition seeked to unify the mercurial nature of human traditions and politics around what it means to be black. Be it beauty, fashion, identity or skin tone Botchway’s message isn’t just static, it isn’t just a state of being, it is a state of becoming something more.
Christabel Johanson on the work of Kwesi Botchway
Bold Head King, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 31 x 31 in. Courtesy of Gallery 1957, London Read more »
The Medium is the Message, exhibition in London
The Medium is the Message we can therefore say finds purpose in curating nuanced work. It contains work from a group of artists that explores shades of colour, blackness and identity. It seeks to “return to the raw constituents of painting, to find what can be said about black identity today, through medium alone.”