Curriculum

ohn Edmonds’s first encounter with visual art was by way of religious iconography. No surprise, then, that his portraits of Black strangers, lovers, and friends so often come cocooned in a beatific light. Whether employing the vivid silk of a durag or the arc of a wooden mask, or restaging the fraught romance of James Baldwin’s novel in Paris, Edmonds portrays his subjects in precisely textured juxtapositions, homing in on expressions and poses that are sometimes placid, but never passive. His debut monograph, , published in 2018, and his