September 15 - November 18, 2023
From the Houston Museum of African American Culture:
“The exhibition will open with a member preview on Friday, September 15 from 6-8PM, although all are invited! Come and learn about how to become a member. GODBODY will feature paintings Floyd has created over his brief five-year career. As with exhibitions that have come over the past 12 months from artists David-Jeremiah, Ellsworth Ausby and Evita Tezeno, this will be the first museum solo exhibition of Johnny Floyd’s paintings.
The works in Floyd’s exhibition GODBODY are a rumination on the intersection of classical mythologies, ancestral connection, and modern Black culture as artifact. Employing traditional portrait painting filtered through a surrealistic lens, Floyd interrogates notions of conventional aesthetics in the contemporary moment while centering Blackness in historical narratives that have been intentionally exclusionary for centuries. GODBODY is a reimagination of orthodox folklore of the past, a reclamation of the accounting of the present, and a consideration of the possibilities of what is to come.
In Floyd’s previous exhibition at Conduit Gallery, titled Hyperblack Spectacle, of which some paintings are included in the HMAAC exhibition, “the paintings sprang from a thought experiment: What if Black Bodies were phenotypically presented through a visual language that more accurately presented the dynamic and improvisational nature of Blackness? What happens to the Black figure if it is allowed to exist outside the conventions created to stifle and strip away the profound beauty that is inherent in the Black experience? What if we brought forth the all-encompassing prismatic nature of Blackness as both a color and a cultural identity to the surface? Hyperblack Spectacle emerges humbly and simply as one of the infinite answers to these questions.” -Conduit Gallery, Dallas.
“Floyd’s work is an important tributary that branches off into the rich variety of Black Figurative aesthetics over the past decade,” Blay stated. “His paintings oscillate between the shallowest washing of paint and brushstrokes to impasto and almost fresco-like surfaces of vibrant, exaggerated, colors that vibrate with exuberance and melancholy.” “
Reception: September 16, 2023 | 2–4 pm
Houston Museum of African American Culture
4807 Caroline St.
Houston, TX
(713) 353-1578
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