When Claudette Johnson was a student in Wolverhampton in 1982, she saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Its effect was double-edged: it freed her imagination but its appropriation of African masks was troubling to a young Black woman.
Johnson began exploring this conundrum with magnificent painting-drawings like And I Have My Business in This Skin and I Came to Dance. Both made in 1982, they’re fractured, but clearly depict Black women, who were largely absent, objectified or caricatured in art history. In both, a lone woman stretches into the corners of the paper, barely contained.
