John Edmonds: The Space Between

You feel it before you can name it: the hush of a historic home where the living and the remembered have agreed to share a roof. Art occupies every surface. Personal photographs, books, and antique objects jostle for space.

The house is George Nelson Preston’s uptown brownstone, which doubles as the Museum of Art and Origins. Preston is an artist, poet, and scholar who has spent a lifetime studying, teaching, collecting, and living with African art. His sculptures by Baule and BaKongo artists stand guard. His documentary photographs from Akuapem-Mamfe, Ghana, where he holds a chief title, take pride of place.

In homage to Preston, Edmonds has hung sepia-toned, larger-than-life photographs of the house he took. One shows a forest-green tiled bathroom stacked with multicolored towels. Another is The Chief’s Desk (Or where the sky meets the ground), groaning under art, books, a computer, and sculpture, and set against the wall like a giant mirror.

Edmonds has also included a photograph of Chiani from his now-famous series 17 Portraits of New York Men, along with new portraits of men from his community inside the house. One man rests his head on a sculpture in the garden. Another leans against a wall festooned with masks. A third stares down an ancestral object at eye level. They are looked at. They look back.

Past and present regard one another across the generations. Lineage is inherited, honored, and made.

John Edmonds (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.) lives and works in Brooklyn. He grew up visiting the National Portrait Gallery, studied art at the Corcoran, and later, Yale. He is known for tender, formally precise photographs of Black men. His 2019 Whitney Biennial presentation and 2020 Brooklyn Museum solo, A Sidelong Glance, brought wide attention to a practice built around intimacy, looking, and the possibilities of portraiture. He met Preston in 2019. A year later, he was in Ghana for the first time.