Johnathan Payne

Johnathan Payne (he/him) is a visual artist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa. He obtained a BA in art from Rhodes College in 2012 and received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2018. While at Yale, Payne co-curated exhibitions centering historically underrepresented artistic voices, including Publishing Camp: Queering Dissemination (2017), Queering Space at Yale, and Black Joy ( both 2016). Additionally, he worked as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery (2016–2018), and received the Gloucester Residency Prize in summer 2017. In 2018, Payne completed museum leadership training programs at The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Working across drawing, painting, fibers, and installation, Payne’s work engages traditional and alternative modes of object and image production. His abstractions occupy a space of radical formalism where methodology, experimentation, and craft converge. Payne’s most recent body of work is a rigorous engagement of collage, embroidery, and color painting processes. Using shredded paper, he weaves and adheres the material onto itself to construct intricately gridded substrates that are primed and painted several times over. Unconventional and idiosyncratic in nature, Payne’s works defy categorical definition. They oscillate between—and derive influence from—painting, sculpture, 2D design, and textile arts. Craft-affirming art movements such as Pattern and Decoration, as well as the schools of Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, also underpin Payne’s approach to artmaking.

Recent exhibitions of Payne’s work include Threads at Foxy Production (2021; New York), Miss Lizzie’s Lattice at Deli Gallery (2020; New York), and Small Talk At the Salad Bar at SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020; New York). He is featured in New American Paintings (MFA Annual #135), and has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Observer, and Vice. Payne was a spring 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, Tennessee, and is currently the 2020–2022 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa, where he is a visiting assistant professor at the School of Art and Art History. Payne is the inaugural recipient of the Aminah Residency, named after the late Columbus-based artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.

Image:

Johnathan Payne, Detail of Jewel, 2019-2020

Acrylic, thread on shredded-and-collaged paper

59.25 × 74.75 inches (framed)

Courtesy of the artist