Unit extend their warmest congratulations to Claudette Johnson on the news she has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2024.
Johnson has been nominated on account of her two standout solo shows in the last year: Presence at The Courtauld Gallery, London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York. She is nominated alongside Pio Abad, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas, and an exhibition of their work will be held at Tate Britain, London, from 25 September 2024 to 16 February 2025. The 40th winner of the major prize will be announced at an award ceremony at Tate Britain on 3 December 2024.
Johnson is noted for her figurative portraits of Black women and men that counter the marginalisation of Black people in Western art history. The intimacy with which Johnson works invests her portraits, which are often of her own family and friends, with a palpable sense of presence. She started her career as a founding member of the BLK Art Group, which she joined in 1981 while still a student at Wolverhampton University. In an effort to bring young Black artists from Wolverhampton University together, the BLK Art Group organised the historic First National Black Art Convention in 1982, attended by many influential contemporary artists like Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid (the 2017 winner of the Turner Prize), Keith Piper, and Sonia Boyce. Johnson was the only woman to deliver a lecture at the convention, which she entitled Images of Black Women in Art, addressing her own practice and stating explicitly that her work was “for other black women.”
A statement from Tate announcing the shortlist reads, “In a year that the jury felt represented a milestone in her practice, they were struck by Johnson’s sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects.”
Johnson’s artwork Untitled (Dancing Figure) (1981) can currently be seen in Unit’s exhibition in Venice, In Praise of Black Errantry. It is the first time that the work, a charcoal piece that depicts a nude woman dancing, has ever been publically exhibited.
In Praise of Black Errantry features 19 Afro-diasporic artists in an exploration of the radical Black imagination, considering how themes of errantry as a form of freedom and resistance paved the way for Black modernism.
The curator of the group exhibition, Indie A. Choudhury (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London), writes the following in her catalogue essay entitled Wayward Women:
“Johnson is known foremost for her intimate portrayals of Black women recasting their presence – historical, imagined, visible, metaphorical, and present – back into a narrative and a visual canon that has often erased them; there is a liberatory feel to this captured moment – the unabashed pleasure and enjoyment for, and of, oneself in dancing naked. There is a waywardness to this freedom and abandon that invites the viewer to share in the Black female form in praise of herself.”
