Leasho Johnson is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture.
2025 Biennial Year Find out more
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.
Liverpool Biennial 2025
Leasho Johnson
‘The sea is another country’ 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City)
‘The shrinking world (Anansi #25)’ 2023
Collection of Dirk Denison and David Salkin
‘With stony hearts or with a wound (Anansi #30)’ 2024
Courtesy of the artist and TERN Gallery, Nassau
‘Buried beyond the pasture without any names (Anansi #22)’ 2023
Collection of Tony & Sondra Karman
Leasho Johnson, now based in Chicago, USA was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. He uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity after empire.
His densely pigmented, large-scale paintings often include characters that live on the edge of perception through figurative abstraction. The characters
‘The sea is another country’ 2024 Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City) ‘The shrinking world (Anansi #25)’ 2023 Collection of Dirk Denison and David Salkin ‘With stony hearts or with a wound (Anansi #30)’ 2024 Courtesy of the artist and TERN Gallery, Nassau ‘Buried beyond the pasture without any names (Anansi #22)’ 2023 Collection of Tony & Sondra Karman Leasho Johnson, now based in Chicago, USA was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. He uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity after empire. His densely pigmented, large-scale paintings often include characters that live on the edge of perception through figurative abstraction. The characters and motifs in his work reference both ancestral and contemporary stories. Johnson reinterprets real narratives and accounts – often of homophobic or gender-based violence – merging them with contemporary matters and his own lived experience. His use of paint materials intersects Western and non-Western traditions by use of raw pigments extracted from the Global South and the Caribbean, such as logwood dye, indigo and coffee. His hybridised approach to painting and drawing aims to disrupt perceptions around historical, political, stereotypical, and biological expectations of the Black queer body.
Leasho Johnson
-
Leasho Johnson. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Walker Art Gallery. Photography by Mark McNulty.
Venue
Walker Art Gallery
William Brown Street, Liverpool, L3 8ELAccess facilities available
View venue
-
Leasho Johnson, ’Paradise has its price (Anansi #20),’ 2022. Image courtesy of the artists and Harpers Gallery. -
Leasho Johnson, ‘Set adrift, aimless, hopeless and destructive,’ 2024. Image courtesy of the Artists and Marianne Ibrahim Gallery -
Leasho Johnson, ‘Reading beyond the tragic,’ 2022. Image courtesy of the artists and Harpers Gallery
