Women Taking Up Space
Visibility and the black female body in contemporary art
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Last weekend I saw an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London featuring the work of the British artist Claudette Johnson. She makes large-scale drawings, mostly of black women. I’ve seen examples of her work before, but never in this quantity. She draws with pastel, which gives a lot of movement to her line and a richness of colour that makes it feel like the subjects are barely contained within the frame. Johnson describes these drawings as her attempt to ‘project the presence of the person’.
Like so many other black female artists Johnson’s work has only recently started to be properly recognised by the Art World establishment despite a decades-long career. She was born in 1959 in Manchester, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, and began her career as a visual artist in the early 1980s. It was at that time she met other radical young artists including Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper, and Sonia Boyce who were beginning to explore issues of race and gender during a period of heightened racial tensions in the UK. These artists were founding members of the Black British Arts Movement, collaborating and exhibiting together against a backdrop of government…
