John Barnes, Jr. was born December 2, 1971 in Bogalusa, LA. At the age of 4 his family moved to Baton Rouge where he remained until completing college. John has always been an imaginative thinker who enjoyed drawing more than any other form of communication. “I used to be an extremely shy and distant child, and that barrier, that distance, enabled me to have an outsider’s perspective which still to this day I maintain,” Recalls Barnes. A born artist, John was able to render recognizable human figures by the age of 2, and able to develop complex compositions in pen and ink by age 6.

It wasn’t until John’s sophomore year of college that he decided to pursue art as a career. “I majored in business management, political science, and thermonuclear engineering, before I took a chance and followed my passions. All of my life I was discouraged from pursuing art. I was often advised by my family and close friends that you have to be dead before your work is worth anything,” says Barnes. After taking the chance, Barnes excelled rapidly and began researching pre-colonial artwork from primarily Africa, and the Oceanic region. “After reading about their ancestral worship rituals and seeing how art functioned in these so-called primitive societies, I started to notice patterns in my own work that echoed these influences. I started to develop parallels between western culture and these African and Oceanic cultures in my work”, states Barnes. Barnes recieved his undergraduate degree from Southern A&M University in Baton Rouge and his MFA from Memphis College of Art.

John Barnes currently lives in New Orleans with his wife and two children and is a Chair of Visual Arts at Dillard University

"I believe that the year 2020 holds metaphorical significance to 20/20 vision. In this year in America the hidden racism, hate, passions, politics, conflict as well as pestilence have been brought into razor-sharp focus. I constructed these two eye studies shadow-boxes to present the binary through which all of this information and change will flow into our minds and souls. Each piece is constructed out of found and fabricated wood media."