Rianna Jade Parker Tell me about your first New York solo exhibition, ‘The Love of Men and the Fear of Stones’, an intimate show of six paintings at Harper’s in Chelsea.
Leasho Johnson I first came to New York in 2016, when I spent three months here as part of the Residency Unlimited programme. At the time, I was trying to plot a way to get my work into a New York gallery, so this show felt like a culmination of all these years of working as an artist – an opportunity for me to come full circle. Harper’s is a wonderful space and a lot of Jamaican folks who are operating in New York came through for the opening, which was nice.
In a lot of ways, I owe this show to the artist Eddie Martinez. He did studio visits with me when I was in New York, and he really loved my work. I’m grateful for that relationship and I’m hoping it will evolve into something bigger in the future.
RJP The title of your exhibition comes from a stanza in the poem ‘Broken II’ [2007] by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller. Can you speak to Miller’s influence on your work as a queer Black artist?
LJ For me, Miller is just another character or element in my paintings – part of the background, so to speak. He’s thinking about his queerness and his Jamaican-ness within the same kind of framework as I am, and he’s found so many different ways to put that into words.
RJP You completed a MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. How did that experience influence your current practice?