KHARI TURNER

(b. 1991) is an American artist that is living and working in New York, New York. Currently a recent graduate from Austin Peay State University with his BFA. He is now a graduate candidate at Columbia University’s School of the Arts receiving his MFA.

“My work right now is a diary of struggle and overcoming struggle. I’m exploring the history of black defeat, black revolutions, and black accomplishments coalescing through mark making, realism, and expressionism. I pull from my life growing up in Milwaukee, WI. My ambitions are to render my connection to blackness and to have a conversation about black issues without creating images displaying the pain black people have gone through or go through. This is the duality I want to put into the work. The noses and lips of black skin represent my history and connection to my heritage, but they also represent the fact that people with wider noses, thicker lips, and darker skin statistically getting longer prison sentences in the US and this positive and negative is what drive the point of the work.”

Superposition Gallery and Artmatic present House of Crowns at PHILLIPS