Johnnie Bess

Covered Dish, 2023

Reduction Fired Glazed Stoneware

4 x 6 x 6 inches

Courtesy of the artist

www.johnniebessart.com, @johnniebessart

Johnnie Bess is a D.C. based, multi-media artist who specializes in ceramic sculpture and portraiture. After receiving his BFA in painting and photography from Howard University in 2009, Bess began to teach Visual Art in Washington D.C. public schools. In 2011 the artist settled his family in Miami, Florida, where he has been teaching and showing work ever since. In 2016, inspired by pre-Columbian pottery encountered with elders in travels to Guasca, Columbia and joyful memories of insight gained via mentors at Howard, Bess reacquainted himself with clay and hasn't looked back since, incorporating ceramics widely into his own curriculum and steadily more extensively in his exhibition work. Bess uses his paintings and ceramic work to question and affirm our collective identities, our roots. As a military "brat" who moved around every few years as a kid, the artist has developed a keen sensitivity to an ever nagging question... "Where you from?" In 2019 Bess was awarded the Oolite Arts, Teacher's Travel grant to return to Iwakuni, Japan, where he lived in his childhood, to learn the city's 400-year-old style of traditional ceramics pottery known as Hagi ware. For Bess, art serves as a means to explore and elucidate compartmentalized areas of his own spirit, exploring veiled nature/nurture aspects of the psyche to make them whole again, free and spontaneous, mirroring the collective evolution he envisions for all children of the African Diaspora.