John Obafemi Jones

John Obafemi Jones is an American Afro-Diasporic Expressionist painter whose work is grounded in memory, migration, ancestry, and the cultural traditions of the African diaspora. For more than fifty years, he has made paintings informed by the histories and experiences of the American South, Black urban America, and the Caribbean. Family, labor, music, spirituality, migration, and inherited memory have remained central to his work and to his interest in what one generation receives from another.

Jones was born in Ellaville, Georgia, and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The rural South remained part of his family history as he grew up within the cultural life of Black Brooklyn. His experience of these two places—one Southern and rural, the other Northern and urban—would later be joined by a third: the Caribbean.

Jones attended Pratt Institute before earning a Bachelor of Science in Fine Arts from Fisk University, where he studied from 1970 to 1975. At Fisk, he studied under artist, scholar, and curator Dr. David C. Driskell, who was chairman of the art department, Jones's painting instructor, and his faculty advisor. During these years, Jones also came to know Aaron Douglas, the pioneering artist and former Fisk faculty member whose continued presence on campus connected students to an earlier generation of African American art.

His education at Fisk went beyond the classroom and studio. Jones helped install exhibitions at the Fisk University Galleries, where he encountered the work of artists including Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden. His years there immersed him in a tradition of African American art and scholarship that would remain important throughout his life. Driskell's scholarship, Douglass's example, and the work Jones encountered in the Fisk galleries helped shape his understanding of what it meant to be a Black artist and what it took to sustain a life devoted to art.

In 1979, Jones moved to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. More than four decades of life in the Caribbean brought him into closer contact with the histories linking Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South. In his paintings, these places belong to the same history, marked by migration and displacement, but also by survival, adaptation, and the persistence of cultural traditions.

Jones works primarily in mixed media, combining acrylic, graphite, oil stick, fabric, collage, and other materials. He builds his paintings through layers, improvisation, revision, and erasure. Figures, symbols, marks, and fragments appear and disappear across the surface, much as memories themselves can fade, return, or change over time. His interest is not in illustrating history but in painting what remains after history has passed through people's lives: memory, emotion, tradition, loss, and survival.

Music has long been central to Jones's work. Jazz, blues, gospel, and Afro-Caribbean music inform the rhythm and structure of his paintings. His approach to the canvas often resembles improvisation. He responds to what develops before him, building and revising the work through repetition, interruption, gesture, and change. Rhythm is carried through color, mark, surface, and form.

Throughout his career, Jones has returned to subjects that have shaped Black life across generations: family, labor, faith, migration, ancestral presence, resilience, and cultural survival. His paintings consider how people remember, what they carry from one place to another, and what remains when families and communities are separated from their places of origin.

Jones's exhibition history spans more than fifty years and includes solo and group exhibitions in the United States and the Caribbean. In January 2026, Cane Roots Art Gallery in Christiansted, St. Croix, presented his solo exhibition I'm Still Here, a body of work concerned with memory, survival, presence, and the determination to continue creating. In March 2022, Cane Roots presented Revelations, a solo exhibition bringing together works drawn from ancestral heritage and Jones's own history.

His work has also been presented at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts in Frederiksted, St. Croix, including the solo exhibition Explosion in Artistic Expression. His paintings were also featured at the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, in Jazz and Blues Inspire, an exhibition examining the connections between music and visual art.

Jones's life in art has never been confined to his own studio. He has served as a board member of the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts and as Head of the Fine Arts Department at the St. Croix Educational Complex. As an educator, he created opportunities for young artists to exhibit their work and encouraged students to encounter art beyond the classroom. His community work has included arts initiatives and free creative workshops for breast cancer patients and survivors.

Today, Jones works between Georgia and St. Croix. His path—from the rural Black South to Bedford-Stuyvesant, from his years at Fisk University to more than four decades in the Caribbean—runs through the work he continues to make. Land, migration, ancestry, music, and memory remain at its center.

Over more than half a century, Jones has built a body of work shaped by places that hold distinct but connected histories of Black life. His paintings bear the memory of the rural South, the cultural life of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the artistic and intellectual tradition of Fisk University, and his long experience in the Caribbean.

For John Obafemi Jones, painting holds what history alone cannot. His work keeps memory present and gives form to the people, places, and stories that might otherwise be lost.