Collector’s conversations.

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Al Johnson's paintings are noted as seeing through the surface in every stroke, creating an abstractive response with deliberation, like carving marble. There a filter lifts the image out of the surface using the brush like a divining rod, withdrawing energy from the canvas, and revealing the summoned image. Al was raised through a system of continual oppression, but he picked up the brush with a commitment to represent a generation of African American artists whose history were erased by systematic structures during its reckoning of the marginalized or underrecognized.  Here is a man that was honored by Romare Bearden as a youth and the youngest court reporter artist of the infamous Hurricane Carter Trial before adulthood. A model of purity and artistic pursuit by his peers, Al has sacrificed everything for his artistry, family relationships and health to pursue his art. He always made space to work, even if it was breaking down a 200 lb. easel to climb five flights of stairs.

Al exemplifies a unique trait in an artist, continually sampling the culture and figuring out what works, shifting from his representational work, listed in the Smithsonian National Registry and storyboard art for Oscar-winning film, commercial, and highly regarded films to spray paint techniques and back to abstract with a range of artistic expression 2D to 3D. He’s kept his fingers on the pulse. His fortress of maturity, living life to support his career, gives hope to younger artists that their experience is typical, working the struggle. Turning self-reflection into action makes Al a unique creative voice trying to make things better. He has his eyes fixed on the future with a unique trait amongst artists being the communicator forging communities of what he believes not only for himself but what his fellow artists may need.

The challenge is so much more for African American artists who were not allowed to be creative for societal practicality while providing for a family.   Al Johnson is one of the first generations of African American artists who felt permission to venture out beyond practical careers supported by generations of hard-working family members serving as a cipher of a community's aspirations. The dichotomy of Al’s upbringing encompassed his father and grandfather Jamaican-born and great-grandfather of Cuban descent, while his mom would vividly speak of the cotton plantations in the fields of North Carolina where she was raised.  They too were storytellers of the African American experience.

Having his daily breakfast under a framed image of a Native American created by the artist at age 8 on a brown paper bag given to him by his Mom at a young age he rooted for the marginalized and continues to fight against conforming narratives. The brush has become his divining blood right, capturing moments with exuberant color and bold markings subversively maintaining our cultural identity.

The impulse to break boundaries plays a part in the revolutionary mindset through Al’s work exhuming generational wombs. Al lives by inspiration, knowing each day as an artist, he’s a producer. His work is recognized for its longevity, a space for timeless introspection.  

written by: Barbara Bullard, author