| Angela Davis Johnson | |
| Birth Place: | Orlando, Florida |
| Nationality: | American |
| Education: | Self-taught |
| Known For: | Painting, sculpture, installation art, ritual performance art |
| Website: | https://www.angeladavisjohnson.com/ |
Angela Davis Johnson (born 1981) is a community-informed, interdisciplinary artist who migrates between Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Arkansas. Her work is rooted in the traditions of black people in what’s known today as the United States American South and is inspired by the collective ancestral memory of the entire African Diaspora. Davis Johnson uses archival images, acrylic and oil paint, found objects, bluing, fabric, beads, strings, hums, fragments of song and poetry, body movement, and gestures to bridge the happenings of the past, present, and future. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and has exhibited in galleries and museums, including Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Mississippi Museum of Art, and the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center.
Angela Davis Johnson was born in Orlando, Florida. She and her family later moved to Virginia, where she attended Governor's School for the Arts, an art magnet school in Norfolk, Virginia. Davis Johnson's interest in art began at a young age. She was first inspired to create art by her mother, who had returned to school for fashion design when Angela was 4 and would share what she had learned with Angela and her siblings. Her mother also encouraged she and her siblings to embrace and explore their creativity through singing, reading, and whittling, and would purchase art supplies for them.
“My mother was an artist who would take everything that she learned and bring it back to us,” she says. “She wouldn’t let us use black or white.” Johnson continued to apply that ethos during her studies at a magnet school in Norfolk, Virginia, but it wasn’t until her family relocated to rural Arkansas that she began to use color metaphorically. “Creating as much information as possible with one brushstroke became really important to me,” she confides. “Each stroke is potent. It’s very self-healing.”[1]
When Angela was 14, her family moved to Lambrook, Arkansas. “I’m from a lot of spaces,” Angela said in an interview, “because my father was in the military. But I claim East Arkansas because that’s where my family is from. It’s the last place my grandmother lived.”[2] While living in Lambrook, Angela deepened her connection with her ancestors, built a relationship with the land, learned the power of community and collaboration, and affirmed herself as an artist. As such, she’d visit the nearest library, 30 minutes away in Helena, to borrow art books which taught her about Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Modigliani, Paul Klee, early Picasso, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Elizabeth Murray, and more.
Angela’s greatest influences, however, were family. Her great-grandmother, a midwife and healer, attracted people from different counties for her homemade medicines. Blue baths were one of her specialties, combining blue tabs, salts, and various herbs, to provide spiritual cleansing and protection. Angela’s mother continued the diasporic tradition of blue baths with Angela and her siblings. Angela’s mother also taught her how to conceptualize and create various things using different materials. Clearing the land to make a home, gardening, building and designing fences from cut trees, and quilting was one such way. Angela was also inspired by her family’s vibrant storytellers, who’d pass down stories they learned from their elders.
Angela Davis Johnson comes from a long line of healers and midwives, a tradition she taps into for her work.[3] Davis Johnson explores how Black people have weathered challenges and injustices in this world, as she states, "the ways that we've been able to withstand, the ways that we've been able to become our own water, become our own rain; how we've really navigated this space that we're in, this time, and have been doing it through our songs and our caretaking of one another."
When asked what she hoped people will take away from her body of work, she responded:
I want people to feel the complexity of the embodied experience of black people in this world. I want people to feel that when they see my work. We’re not just superheroes. We are all things. We are souls living this life. I want people to experience that in my work, feel the depths of that. I want people to recognize and feel their soul. See the thing beyond the construct, which is light, you know. To me it’s like the past, present and future. It’s all happening right now in this moment. I want people to feel that when they come by my work, when they’re away from it. I want people to witness all of that in all of our BIPOC works."'An open mouth creek' depicts a black girl with sad eyes and blue hair whose mouth is shut — though she looks like she wants to talk. It’s a piece that speaks to the silencing of black women throughout history."[4] What first strikes the eye and consciousness when encountering Johnson's work is the scope, the scenery and the subjects.[5]
She incorporates scraps of paper and fabric into many of her oil paintings, as homage to her mother, a pattern maker, and in an effort to introduce humble materials into fine arts spaces.[6]