Leasho T. Johnson

Leasho Johnson (b.1984) is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation and sculpture. 

He was born in Montego-Bay but raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril Jamaica. Johnson uses his experience growing up black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition within Jamaican Dancehall street culture. Focussing on the ephemerality of psychological interiorities, and black mythologies. He uses mediums, made or found, to blur the distinction of stereotype and representation, geography and memory, to reveal or hide western contentions with the black body.

Working in 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 and biological expectations of the of the black queer body. His work aims to garner space and autonomy of black bodies to reimagine itself.

Leasho Johnson is currently a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow for 2021. A recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) 2018 - 2020. Leasho has shown his work locally at several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions, Young Talent, 2010; Jamaica Biennial 2012, 2014 and 2017, ‘We Have Met Before’, 2017, and New Local Space (NLS) ‘Belisario and the Soundboy’ 2016. Internationally Leasho has exhibited in ‘Long Hello’, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, 2020, ’Resisting Paradise’, Puerto Rico & Montreal, 2019, ‘Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora’, Bristol, UK 2016, ‘Jamaican Routes’, Oslo, Norway 2016, ‘Jamaica Jamaica’, Philharmonie, Paris France and Brazil, 2017 and 2018. "Caribbean Queer Visualities", Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Ireland, 2016, ‘Of Skin and Sand’ National Gallery of Bahamas, 2017, and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami 2017.