Johnny Coleman
Johnny Coleman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. His sculptural work and sound installations are composed as intentional gestures in homage and prayer. He holds the Young Hunter Professorship of Art and Africana Studies at Oberlin College. He has created sound installations for Arts institutions throughout the U.S. Over the last twenty five years, he has worked collaboratively with a range of poets, musicians, dancers, and visual artists across the United States. Additionally, he has performed on stage at BAM, Majestic Theater: Next Wave Festival ‘96, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the following: Fort Wayne Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, The California Center for the Arts, N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, and extensive private collections. Research interests include site specificity of African American cultural experience, the African roots of the banjo, furniture design, and the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Mother-Guides
In Crossing The Water: Requiem for Lee Howard Dobbins
2019
SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH
Artist Statement
My work is centered upon themes of the crossroads: a focal point/threshold of challenge and transformation. For the last thirty years I have been composing spaces activated as prayers: requests for guidance, conscious statements of intent and thanksgiving. For me, to speak from one’s own experience is to empower one’s self-creation. Memory, observation, and imagination are resources that I draw upon: images emerge from within the day to day. My process involves marking materials and spaces with time spent: working, writing, and speaking through the voices that form and inform me. I bind layered narrative passages together with functional and symbolic references to personal, and cultural history. I am working in a sculptural format that integrates the dramatic presentation of a stage set, with the oral tradition of storytelling, while consciously focusing upon private spaces that sometimes exist in the absence of a performer. I carefully select materials that function as witnesses: recovered old growth wood, unprocessed bees wax, stone, reclaimed fabric; and call upon them as a sentient witness and reminder of the resilience of those who came before me.
New Histories, New Futures
Organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art Transformer Station, OH
June 26–September 12, 2021
As part of the exhibition, Coleman’s installation Constellations As Yet Unnamed centered on eight formerly enslaved women and girls who escaped from the Dobbins farm in Mason County, Kentucky in 1853. When en route to Oberlin, Lee Howard Dobbins, the four-year-old boy whom they had adopted and were shepherding north to freedom, fell ill. He was left in the care of a family there, where he passed away a few days later. The women continued on to Canada, and it has been Coleman’s project to trace their stories and recover their identities. The artist describes their stories as “lost to history,” and says, “My extended work has been an ongoing effort to retrieve the history surrounding the entire group of nine individuals who stole themselves away on that occasion back in 1853.”
As visitors move throughout this immersive installation, the voices of eight contemporary Black women living in Oberlin can be heard, speaking across time and space to the eight formerly enslaved women. The artist has not scripted these narratives, but asked the participants the following: If given the opportunity to speak directly to these courageous women, what would you say to them?
The ambient sounds, smells, and sights in the installation recall the landscape that the group navigated on their journey across the Ohio River, traveling primarily under the cover of night. The voices of the eight women rise and fall alongside ambient nature sounds, the spring song of a blackbird to represent the Dobbins boy, and the continuous murmur of prayer.
At Tusen Takk, Johnny constructed the small birdhouses to be part of this installation, one structure representative of each woman. The birdhouses were illuminated with a candle, functioning as lanterns, and filmed at dusk over the Ohio River— this footage was included as a single-channel video in the installation. The birdhouses were featured in the installation, suspended from the ceiling of a small post and beam structure, and carried the recorded voices of these women who risked everything to carry a brown baby boy with them to a place where he might have been free.
Constellations As Yet Unnamed is one of several sites activated as prayers, what the artist considers ‘gestures’ in homage to this story. For more information, visit the artist’s website here. Previous iterations include:
And the Presence of Light, Weston Gallery, Cincinnati, OH, 2021
Blackbird (For a Brown Baby Boy), Curated Storefront, Law Building, Akron, OH, 2019
Crossing the Water: Requiem for Lee Howard Dobbins, SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH, 2019
Flight: Requiem for Lee Howard Dobbins, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, 2013
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