Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist,scholar, composer, and curator. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the past. Through her visual,sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. Above all, she is interested in redistributing the privileges that allow her to maintain her creative and scholarly practice. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, India, New York City, and Providence. She has curated exhibitions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Artist Proof Studio and the ABSA Art Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa; The Shoe Shop and Quilt Museum in Camden, Alabama, RISD Museum; and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, where she was also a Public History of Slavery Fellow.
Lee-Johnson has had residencies and fellowships at the Rhode Island Department of Health, American Antiquarian Society, Oxbow, and the RISD Museum,among others. Notably, as the Fitt Artist in Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study she created Not Never More, a visual remix of the historic wallpaper Les Vues D’amérique Du Nord. She was invited to design a memorial for the 150th anniversary of the Colfax Massacre, etched in granite, to honor and center the stories of the Black victims. She illustrated Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, adapted for young readers by Ibram X Kendi.
Lee-Johnson's work can be found in public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Center for Disease Control Museum, RISD Museum,and the Boston Public Library.
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