Claudette Johnson was born in Longsight, Manchester, England to Jamaican parents, who were part of the Windrush Generation, in 1959; in 1979 she enrolled at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she co-founded the Blk Art Group with fellow artists Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers and Donald Rodney. In 2011 she co-founded the BLK Arts Research Group with Marlene Smith and Keith Piper, in order to re-examine the BLK Arts Group's historical legacy. In 2019, an overview of her work, <em>I Came to Dance</em> was held at Modern Art Oxford and in late 2021 she was represented in <em>Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now</em> at Tate Britain; her work is held in many UK public collections.
Painter and activist, Claudette Johnson was born in 1959 in Longsight, Manchester, England to Jamaican immigrant parents who had arrived in the UK as part of the Windrush Generation. She attended Levenshulme Secondary Modern School for Girls and completed a foundation certificate in Art at Manchester Polytechnic before enrolling at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1979. There she co-founded the Blk Art Group, along with artists Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers and Donald Rodney and, later, Marlene Smith. She subsequently gave a presentation at the First National Black Arts Conference, organised by the Group in 1982, which, in the artist's own words, 'was an attempt to demonstrate, through examples from my own work, that black women artists were exploring a different reality in their work, one that the mainstream art world was entirely unaware of. I felt that the experience of being part of the first generation of British-born black women was driving a new force in art and leading to the creation of dramatically different images that were subversive, truthful and challenging' (interview, Creative Boom, 31 May 2019). Johnson participated in all three of the exhibitions in London curated by artist Lubaina Himid in the 1980s that have since defined the black feminist art movement in Britain: Five Black Women at The Africa Centre, Black Woman Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (both 1983), and The Thin Black Line at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA, 1985). Johnson's work also featured in several other exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s, including Into the Open: New Paintings, Prints and Sculptures by Black Contemporary Artists at the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield (1984); The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art, at the Cornerhouse, Manchester (1987); In This Skin: Drawings by Claudette Johnson, Black Art Gallery (1992) and Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966-1986, Royal Festival Hall, London (1997). In 1994 Johnson received a Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at the University of Greenwich.
Johnson's figures have been described as 'monolithic, seemingly to resist their containment within the edges of the paper. She usually works from life onto large sheets of paper taped to the studio wall. She begins with a dry pastel drawing, which she often paints over in sections using blocks of watercolour and gouache paint, before adding a final layer of drawing with pastel. The background, usually comprised of imagined and abstracted geometric forms, is created intuitively after the completion of the figure. The results are richly coloured and sensuous images that convey a sense of urgency in their expressive broken lines and pulsing forms. Johnson describes her work as existing outside the realm of portraiture; rather she sees it as creating a 'presence' for her subject that resists objectification' (Laura Castagnini, Tate). Johnson herself has written that: 'I do believe that the fiction of 'blackness' that is the legacy of colonialism can be interrupted by an encounter with the stories that we have to tell about ourselves.' (Hollybush Gardens, 2016, p. 6), elaborating that: 'I'm interested in our humanity, our feelings and our politics; some things which have been neglected.' With regards to her frequent use of pastel in her work, she has noted: 'I work with the tension of a society committed to distorting, controlling and mis-defining Black women. Yet I continue to find expression in images of black pastel women, chaotic and austere, pushing against the boundaries of white paper' (exhibition notes, Claudette Johnson: I Came to Dance, Modern Art Oxford (2019)).
In 2011, Johnson co-founded the BLK Arts Research Group with Marlene Smith and Keith Piper, in order to re-examine the BLK Arts Group's body of work and historical legacy. As a result, in 2012 a symposium with a retrospective exhibition entitled The Blk Art Group was held at the Graves Gallery, Sheffield, and an international conference entitled Reframing the Moment was held at the University of Wolverhampton. Johnson's recent exhibitions include Thin Black Line(s), at Tate Britain (2012); No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990, Guildhall Art Gallery (2015) and Claudette Johnson, Hollybush Gardens (2017). In 2019, an extensive overview of her work, I Came to Dance was held at Modern Art Oxford and in late 2021 her work featured in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now at Tate Britain. In 2023, the Courtauld Gallery presented a major exhibition of of her work. Claudette Johnson lives and works in London, England. In 2024, Johnson was nominated for the Turner Prize. Her work is held in multiple UK public collections, including Arts Council England, Manchester Art Gallery, Tate, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.