Leasho Johnson, born in 1984, is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition within Jamaican Dancehall street culture. Working at the conjunction of painting and drawing, Johnson makes characters that live on the edge of perception, visible and invisible at the same time. His work lives to disrupt historical, political, and biological expectations of the Black queer body. Johnson is currently a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow for 2021. A recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago 2018–020, he has shown his work in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica and the New Local Space in Kingston, and spaces in Puerto Rico, Montreal, Paris, Miami, and Belfast, among other places.
Leasho Johnson is a former fellow of the Jamaica Art Society. He was a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow for 2021. A recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) 2018 - 2020. Leasho has shown his work in his home country at several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions, including Young Talent, 2010; Jamaica Biennial 2012, 2014 and 2017, ‘We Have Met Before’, 2017, and New Local Space (NLS) ‘Belisario and the Soundboy’ 2016. Internationally, Leasho has exhibited in ‘Fragments of Epic Memory’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada 2021, ’Resisting Paradise’, Puerto Rico & Montreal, 2019, ‘Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora’, Bristol, UK 2016, ‘Jamaican Routes’, Oslo, Norway 2016, ‘Jamaica Jamaica’, Philharmonie, Paris France and Brazil, 2017 and 2018. Leasho is currently based in Chicago, where he works and Lectures at the School of Art Institute Chicago. His work is also part of various notable private collectors, as well as Museum permanent collections. terngallery
