claudette johnson
untitled
​london borough of camden, 2018

Photography (c) Alice Wilson, 2018

Johnson’s work is inscribed with bold attempts to both counter widespread negative portrayals of black women and men and to combat what effectively amounts to their lack of visibility in assorted arenas. Correspondingly, Johnson’s work seeks to create a range of depictions of the black body that is free from, or resists, objectification.

Claudette Johnson lives and works in London. She was a member of the BLK Art Group as well as co-founder of the BLKArts Research Group with Marlene Smith and Keith Piper. Her work is included in the collections of Mappin Art Gallery, Arts Council England Collection, Manchester Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The British Council and Rugby Art Gallery. In the 1980s Johnson showed her work in a number of seminal shows including Five Black Women, Africa Centre, London, 1983, Black Women Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre London,1984, The Thin Black Line, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London,1985, In This Skin: Drawings by Claudette Johnson, Black Art Gallery, London, 1992. And more recently she has participated in exhibitions such as, Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966 – 1986, Royal Festival Hall, London,1990, The Caribbean Cultural Centre, The Studio Museum Harlem and The Bronx Museum of Arts, New York,1997/98, Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain, London, 2011/2012, No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London, 2015. The 1980s Today’s Beginnings?, vanabbemuseum, 2016, The Place is Here, Nottingham Contemporary and South London Gallery, 2017, Claudette Johnson, Hollybush Gardens, 2017, and Meticulous Observations, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2017/2018 curated by Lubaina Himid. Most recently, Johnson showed in About Face at Rugby Art Gallery.