Johnny Floyd is a self-taught artist working in Detroit, MI and Atlanta, GA. Floyd’s work examines the Black experience through an interrogation of both historical and current cultural phenomena while simultaneously imagining a future in which Blackness in The United States of America is a sustainable condition. He strives to allow his practice to be one of resistance, recovery, and reparation. His work has been shown in Dallas, Detroit, and Los Angeles and is included in the permanent institutional collections of Roanoke College and the Dallas Museum of Art.
His paintings are a meditation on the liminal space resting between the extrinsic nature of societal perception and the intrinsic experiential reality of Blackness in America. He strives to allow his work to act as a portal to a world in which the Black Body is disconnected from a historically oppressive gaze. In pursuit of reclaiming the perspective from which traditional standards of beauty and aesthetics have emerged in the classic western artistic canon, his work endeavors to recenter the Black experience in hopes of granting agency and autonomy in the imagining of alternate possibilities and futures.
His practice is a process-driven rumination on the intersection of classical mythologies, ancestral connection, modern Black cultural artifacts, and historical records. Through the melding of figurative, surrealistic, and abstracted practices, he employs a broad artistic lens that coalesces into a visual language better suited to articulate a vision of resistance, recovery, and reclamation. His work aims to humbly present possible answers to these imperative questions.
