Steven Johnson

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I draw, document and archive intimate scenes and histories in an effort to reframe the way we talk about Blackness. Through strokes of charcoal and graphite and the lens, I make Blackness and darkness the protagonist. Throughout this interpretive archivism, I shift the paradigm which considers whiteness/ light the dominant formal aspect across paper. Working from memory, interviews, verbal histories, and family keepsakes, I navigate a cross-generational, cross-cultural, and cross-diasporic hypothesis of what I would say to a biological child of mine—unbesmirched by the colonized imagination. Some of these materials are fragmented or damaged, told secondhand, or else gleaned from painful memories half-remembered; others are passed down by elders to metabolize inherited trauma. I then transmogrify these artifacts into a visual love letter to possible inheritors of that trauma. Channeling intergenerational resistance, wisdom, and resilience, my drawings and activities explore the counter-narrative necessary to eclipse the burden of inherited and bestowed trauma central to Black and Othered bodies.

Artwork