Claudette Elaine Johnson MBE (born 1959) is a British visual artist. She is known for her large-scale drawings of Black women and men and her involvement with the BLK Art Group. She was described by Modern Art Oxford as “one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today”.
Claudette Johnson was born in Manchester, UK. She studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. While still a student there, she became a founder member of the BLK Art Group and took part in their second show at the Africa Centre, London, in 1983.[2] Her talk, and seminar, at the First National Black Arts Conference in 1982 is recognised as a formative moment in the Black feminist art movement in the UK.
“I didn’t visit Jamaica until I was in my early 20s and go to any part of Africa until my early 50s. And yet I am a woman of African-Caribbean descent so my work is [partly] an attempt to position myself in relation to this history. It’s trying to tease out all these myths and fables that I grew up with.”
Claudette Johnson
