Claudette Johnson: Drawing Black People at Their Own Scale

Claudette Johnson has changed the possibilities of British portraiture by drawing Black women and men as people who command space on their own terms. From the debates of the 1980s Black British Arts Movement to major exhibitions decades later, she has remained committed to the human figure, the power of looking and the freedom of her sitters.

A different way of seeing

Born in Manchester in 1959, Claudette Johnson grew up in a Britain where the images of Black women available in established art institutions seldom reflected the complexity of the lives she knew. She studied fine art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic at the turn of the 1980s, a period of political struggle, cultural experimentation and increasingly confident Black British artistic organisation. Rather than use drawing only as preparation for a painting, she treated it as a complete and serious art form. On large sheets of paper, bodies could become expansive without being turned into monuments to another person's authority. ^[1]

The questions that shaped her early work were both formal and political. Who was allowed to look? What did it mean for a Black woman to take up more of a picture than Western galleries had historically permitted? And could an image represent a person without making them available for easy inspection or judgement? Johnson's answer was not simply to reverse a stereotype by substituting an idealised figure. Her sitters can appear alert, uncertain, guarded, thoughtful or still. The balance between assertive scale and private interiority is a defining strength: a viewer is invited to pay attention, but the person depicted does not surrender everything about themselves. ^[2]

Wolverhampton and collective organising

Johnson's work developed alongside that of other young artists associated with the BLK Art Group, including Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers, Donald Rodney and Marlene Smith. The group was not a single aesthetic school in which everyone made similar work. Its members argued about politics, representation and the place of Black artists in institutions that had too often excluded them. They organised exhibitions and discussions, making the case that Black art was not an optional footnote to British culture. Johnson's contribution involved insisting that gender could not be treated as secondary to race in those conversations. ^[3]

At the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, she spoke about the different intentions with which Black women might make and understand images of themselves. The moment matters because she was not merely requesting room on existing gallery walls. She was questioning some of the visual conventions through which women had been presented as exotic, passive or available to the spectator. The argument was inseparable from the pictures she was developing. A new place for Black women in art required more than positive subject matter; it required attention to pose, scale, the gaze and the relationship between a figure and the surrounding space. ^[4]

Images that refused the margins

Works made in the early 1980s, including I Came to Dance and And I Have My Own Business in This Skin, show Johnson wrestling with artistic languages inherited from European modernism while refusing its familiar objectification of Black women. Some figures are fragmented; others adopt poses that challenge the authority of the viewer. Their unfinished or unsettled edges do not imply artistic hesitation. They can convey a mind and body that cannot be fully enclosed within the picture. For an artist trained among collections where Black people frequently appeared as servants or accessories, granting a figure visual centrality was a deliberate intervention into art history. ^[5]

The material qualities of the drawings are essential to that intervention. Pastel, paint, charcoal and watercolour allow line to remain visible as an action rather than disappear into a polished surface. Areas of a body may be intensely worked while others are left only lightly indicated. Blank paper becomes an active field around the figure, not a failure to supply background detail. Johnson often avoids settings that would help an audience categorise a sitter by occupation, neighbourhood or social position. That restraint leaves the viewer to encounter the figure as a person before seeking a biography, even as the choices of scale and placement carry their own history of resistance. ^[6]

The work of Black women artists in the 1980s

Johnson's career was part of a much wider flowering of Black and Asian women's artistic practice. Exhibitions such as Five Black Women at London's Africa Centre in 1983, Black Women Time Now in 1984 and The Thin Black Line, organised by Lubaina Himid at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1985, created vital opportunities for artists who could not rely on mainstream institutions to tell their stories. These events should be remembered as collective achievements. Curators, participating artists, community organisations and audiences each helped make them possible, and the women involved brought strikingly different approaches to painting, photography, sculpture and performance. ^[7]

The significance of those exhibitions can be obscured by the long periods in which many of their participants received little sustained institutional attention afterwards. A groundbreaking group show does not automatically supply the funds, studio space, professional connections or continued commissions that allow a career to flourish. Johnson's path demonstrates this unevenness. Recognition arrived, receded and returned in altered circumstances, while other priorities and forms of work shaped her life. Calling her recent prominence a sudden discovery would ignore the communities that recognised her abilities much earlier. It would also neglect the gap between a moment of institutional celebration and the practical support an artist needs over decades. ^[8]

Returning to the studio

Johnson's public account of her career includes periods when she produced less work and earned a living beyond the art world. That history should not be presented as a mystery about lost talent. Art-making depends on material conditions, including time, studio access and an opportunity to work without constant uncertainty. Friends and colleagues helped restore those conditions when she sought to return to a more sustained practice. Lubaina Himid remained an important supporter, as did renewed connections with artists who understood the significance of the earlier movement. The next phase of work continued rather than erased the experiments Johnson had begun in Wolverhampton. ^[9]

A self-portrait made during the first national Covid-19 lockdown, Doing Lines 1 (Lockdown) Line Journeys (2020), makes this continuity visible. Acquired for the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry through the Contemporary Art Society, the drawing treats the artist's own body as a field of enquiry. Its lines search, repeat and revise; making becomes a process of looking rather than an illustration of a settled idea. The acquisition also connected a contemporary work to a museum that had previously shown Johnson's art in the 1980s. For an artist whose early history was often poorly represented in mainstream narratives, that institutional continuity mattered. ^[10]

The relationship between an original drawing and a public collection is particularly instructive in Standing Figure (2017). Rugby Art Gallery and Museum acquired the picture through the Contemporary Art Society, and a later public conversation brought Johnson together with fellow artist Lubaina Himid. The event belonged to the gallery’s About Face programme, where local audiences could encounter the makers of works entering a civic collection. Johnson’s role in this setting was neither restricted to a distant art-world debate nor made into a symbolic appointment. It involved people seeing a particular picture, asking questions and discussing how the choice of a sitter can change the experience of a gallery. ^[17]

The figure at monumental scale

The 2017 work Standing Figure, acquired for Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, depicts a woman whose presence dominates the page without demanding approval. Her gaze need not meet ours for her authority to be clear. The undefined setting makes the picture something broader than conventional portraiture: a study of how a body occupies the world without performing an assigned social role. The paper, pastel, acrylic and masking tape create a material directness far removed from polished state portraiture. ^[11]

The Contemporary Art Society's account of Johnson's 2023 exhibition Presence describes large reclining and standing figures with the force of a landscape. Such comparisons are revealing. A Black woman's resting body may take the scale and attention usually reserved for expansive scenery or a powerful public figure. The work Reclining Figure (2017), for example, can be read as a study of fatigue and dignity without being reduced to a fixed story about one individual. Its lines leave room for human experience that is not immediately legible to a stranger. Johnson's great formal achievement is to make the viewer feel the weight of another person's presence while respecting their privacy. ^[12]

Another work that helps explain her formal strength is Figure in Raw Umber, acquired by Tate in 2019. The drawing’s title points to a restricted, earthy colour, but the effect is not restrained in the sense of being tentative. Johnson can make a figure occupy the page through weight, pose and deliberately worked boundaries without supplying the tidy setting of a conventional portrait. The public collection gives such experiments a life beyond the conditions in which they were first shown. A visitor meeting the drawing beside very different traditions of British figure painting can ask whose bodies historically deserved scale and whose presence was treated as incidental. ^[18]

Exhibitions, awards and public space

The Courtauld Gallery's exhibition Claudette Johnson: Presence, held from September 2023 to January 2024, brought early and recent work into sustained conversation. It included I Came to Dance, And I Have My Own Business in This Skin and drawings made many years later. This was more than an exercise in belated recognition. Showing different periods together allowed audiences to see how Johnson had remained interested in Black women's agency while changing her treatment of colour, line and pose. In 2024 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, an important nomination rather than a win. The recognition followed decades of work and a wider reassessment of British art history. ^[13]

Johnson also took her figures beyond the gallery. Commissioned by Art on the Underground for Brixton station, Three Women (2024) placed a large triptych in a busy London public setting. The work responds partly to her earlier Trilogy and to the unresolved problems she found in Picasso's representations of women. There is a special force in encountering such images while travelling to work, meeting friends or going about ordinary life. A commuter need not buy a ticket to an exhibition or possess specialist art knowledge to see Black women depicted at monumental scale. The public setting extends the artist's long concern with space into the city itself. ^[14]

An unfinished conversation with art history

Johnson also made a portrait of abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond for the Guardian’s Cotton Capital project. ^[15]

The work opens another direction in her career: attending to a historical Black woman whose campaigning challenged slavery and racism across the Atlantic. It is not a substitute for written history. Instead, the drawing gives its subject a presence that can prompt people to investigate her life. Such an approach can be valuable in public education, where an image may be a reader’s first encounter with someone omitted from a familiar curriculum. The portrait belongs with Johnson’s larger project of making space for individual experience rather than only a category or political argument. ^[5]

Her work also belongs to international debates about the representation of Black figures. At the National Portrait Gallery's 2024 exhibition The Time Is Always Now, Johnson's images appeared alongside artists with distinct approaches to portraiture, including Hurvin Anderson, Lubaina Himid and others from across the African diaspora. The comparison did not erase differences in age, place or style. It demonstrated the many ways a figure can command attention without becoming a token for an entire community. Johnson's central commitment remains strikingly clear: drawing can be an act of imaginative freedom in which Black people occupy the frame as themselves, not as evidence offered to satisfy someone else's expectations. ^[16]

Sources

1. https://contemporaryartsociety.org/explore/resources/claudette-johnsons-presence-courtauld-gallery
2. https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/claudette-johnson/
3. https://iniva.org/library/digital-archive/people/p/piper-keith/
4. https://courtauld.ac.uk/about-us/press-office/press-releases/claudette-johnson-to-have-major-exhibition-at-the-courtauld-gallery-in-september-2023/
5. https://courtauld.ac.uk/about-us/press-office/press-releases/claudette-johnson-pioneering-figurative-artist-unveils-major-exhibition-at-the-courtauld-gallery/
6. https://contemporaryartsociety.org/objects/standing-figure-2017
7. https://contemporaryartsociety.org/explore/resources/striking-new-painting-claudette-johnson-acquired-rugby-art-gallery-and-museum
8. https://iniva.org/notes-from-stuart-hall-library-2012-no3/
9. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/10/12/claudette-johnson-im-trying-to-introduce-another-gazea-black-feminist-gaze
10. https://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/objects/doing-lines-1-lockdown-line-journeys-2020
11. https://www.rugby.gov.uk/pl/w/turner-prize-winner-visits-rugby-art-gallery-and-museum
12. https://courtauld.ac.uk/news-blogs/2023/claudette-johnson-presence-opens-at-the-courtauld-gallery/
13. https://shop.tate.org.uk/tate-dialogues-turner-prize-2024/29822.html
14. https://art.tfl.gov.uk/projects/three-women/
15. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/24/claudette-johnson-art-cotton-capital-nominated-for-turner-prize
16. https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/the-time-is-always-now
17. https://www.rugby.gov.uk/pl/w/turner-prize-winner-visits-rugby-art-gallery-and-museum
18. https://shop.tate.org.uk/claudette-johnson-figure-in-raw-umber/205878.html