Leasho Johnson

He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition in Jamaica. Working at the conjunction of painting and drawing, Johnson makes characters that live on the edge of perception, visible and invisible at the same time. His work lives to disrupt historical, political, stereotypical, and biological expectations of the Black queer body.

Leasho Johnson graduated from the School of the Arts Institute in 2020 with an MFA in Painting and Drawing. He obtained a BFA in Visual Communications at the Edna Manley College of the Visual & Performing Arts in 2009. He was a Leslie Lohman Museum, fellow from 2020-2021 and a Jamaica Art Society Fellow from 2021-2022. He was featured in museum shows including “Picasso: Fifty Years Later,” Elmhurst Museum, Chicago, 2023, “Fragments of Epic Memory,” Art Gallery Ontario, Canada, 2022, and ‘Jamaican Routes’, Oslo, Norway 2016.

He was also a part of the “Jamaica Jamaica” traveling exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, 2020, SESC São Paulo, Brazil, 2018 and Philharmonie De Paris, Paris France, 2017. Leasho has shown his work in his home country at several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions, ‘We Have Met Before’, 2017, and several Kingston Bienniale, from 2012 to the most recent in 2022. His work is also part of various notable private collections, and Museum permanent collections.