Devin B. Johnson
Crossing is a study of histories of representation, urban movement, and diasporic memory as refracted through the mind, heart, and hand of Devin B. Johnson. Drawing upon Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Ramare Bearden’s strategies of cultural collage, and Francesco Careri’s “Walkscapes,” the paintings in this series are an overture to where Johnson’s practice is headed, synthesizing and coalescing the ideas and motifs of his previous exhibitions into his most focused body of work to-date. Through a material negotiation of Black memory, movement, and being, Crossing becomes an ode to the presence and opacity of markmaking, the history of painting, and Johnson’s lived and inherited experience.
Devin B. Johnson: Crossing is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with Nicodim and his second in New York.
– Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
Devin B. Johnson (b. 1992, Los Angeles) obtained his BA in Fine Arts from the California State University of Channel Islands (2015) and received a Masters of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute (2019). In addition to winning the Pratt Alumni Achievement Award in 2024, Johnson was named and Artist-in-Residence for Fountainhead, Miami (2023), he was selected as an Artsy Vanguard (2022), named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Art and Design (2022) list, was included in Cultured’s “Young Artists 2021,” and was one of sixteen artists from around the world selected for the inaugural year of the Black Rock Senegal residency (2020). His work is collected by Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pond Society, Shanghai; the Rubell Museum, Miami; the Columbus Museum of Art; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; and many others. Exhibitions include Crossing, Nicodim, New York (2025, solo); The Amber of this Moment, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2025); Ritual of Welcome, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024, solo); Black Rock Senegal, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, North Carolina (2024); Social Abstraction, curated by Antwaun Sargeant, Gagosian, Los Angeles and Hong Kong (2024); The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); Samantha Joy Groff, Devin B. Johnson, Katherina Olschbaur, Nicodim, New York (2023); Forms, Jeffrey Deitch and Gagosian, Miami (2023); Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest: 10 Years, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2023); PRESENT ‘23, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2023); Ritornellos, Nicoletti Contemporary, London (2023); MATERNITY LEAVE: NONE OF WOMEN BORN, Nicodim in collaboration with the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023); Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); Night Owl, Massimo de Carlo (2022); Dak’Art Biennial, Dakar, Senegal (2022); Between Ground and Sky, Nicodim, New York (2022, solo); My Heart Cries, I Set Out an Offering for You, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2021, solo); Long Walk, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2021, solo); Melody of a Memory, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2020, solo); When You Waked Up the Buffalo, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2020); Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim, AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles (2020); Atmosphere of Certain Uncertainty, Residency Gallery, Inglewood (2019, solo); and Incognito, ICA LA, Los Angeles (2019).
Nicodim in New York has lifted the veil on Crossing, Devin B. Johnson‘s second solo outing with the gallery. Described as “his most focused body of work to-date,” Johnson’s latest suite of paintings traces the fault lines between recurrent themes — entropy, legacy, memory, the collapse of form — into new expressions, drawing a map of where he’s been and all that’s yet to come.
Conceptually, Johnson situates himself within a broad intellectual lineage. His inspirations include Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which interrogates visibility and voice; Romare Bearden’s experimental collage practice, where fragmentation becomes a mode of reconstruction; and Francesco Careri’s “Walkscapes,” which treats movement through space as an act of cultural storytelling. These influences converge into a poetic meditation on mark-making, history, and inheritance, rendering the act of painting both a physical and metaphysical process.